cshadow.exe citrix shadow session

This week I have been trying to automate shadowing a Citrix ICA session. A customer requested that their helpdesk needed to shadow Citrix sessions from their UMRA interface. The usual method of shadowing using their Shadow taskbar or the CMC proved to be not user friendly and hard to delegate to non-administrative users.

Recently UMRA has been expanded to provide support for execution of client level programs. Usually only programs at the scope of the UMRA service could be executed which does not support showing desktop windows on the client side.

The challenge in this case was to configure the Citrix environment using PowerFuse to make sure the CSHADOW.EXE command line was not blocked and could be properly executed from the UMRA environment. We implemented the command line: CSHADOW.EXE /SERVER: /V

A potential problem can be the error code 7050, which basically says you are not currently in an ICA session when starting the CSHADOW.EXE utility. When you start a basic ICA session with desktop and make sure you have enough permissions to start a CMD prompt, then you can execute the command line as stated above.