How To Disable Citrix Workspace Auto-Updates

Intro

While automated updates are generally considered a best practice for most software, there's plenty of solid reasons why an administrator may want to manually deploy new versions of Workspace in a Citrix environment. Updates can bring breaking changes with backwards compatibility issues, stability problems, or even UI updates that may confuse an unsuspecting user. To prevent Citrix Workspace from auto-updating, administrators have two options: install parameters or Group Policy configuration.

Method 1: Install Parameters

If you run automated deployment of Workspace to your endpoints, you can use the "AutoUpdateCheck" silent install switch to control how Citrix Workspace receives and installs updates. For example, to deploy with disabled auto-updates, you can use the following install command:

/silent /forceinstall /includeSSON /EnableCEIP=false /AutoUpdateCheck=disabled

Note: the additional silent install switches above are examples only and may not be appropriate for your use case.

Method 2: Group Policy (ADMX Templates)

If you haven't already loaded the Citrix ADMX/ADML templates into your Group Policy Editor, you can usually find them by visiting the Citrix website page for your Workspace version and locating them under "Admin Tools". These templates provide some pretty powerful control and customization over the Workspace deployment. The latest version of Workspace and the ADMX templates can be found here.

1. Create a new GPO in the appropriate OU and right-click to "Edit"

2. In the Group Policy Management Editor, navigate to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates

3. If you downloaded the ADMX templates from the Citrix website and they are not appearing in the Group Policy editor, you can follow the instructions here to fix this. You may need to close and re-open the editor after loading the templates.

4. Under Administrative Templates, navigate to Citrix Components > Citrix Workspace > Citrix Workspace Updates

5. Double-click to open the "Citrix Workspace Updates" policy setting.

6. First, set the policy to "Enabled". You then have the option to choose an "Auto" or "Manual" update policy. Choose "Manual"

7. Leave the "Citrix-Workspace-Update-DeferUpdate-Count" option set to the default of "-1".

8. Note that we're disabling auto-updates in this tutorial, however, you can use these very same settings to provide additional control over automatic updates, including choosing long-term service release (LTSR) versions only.

9. Click "Ok" to close the window and then close any remaining Group Policy Management Editor windows as necessary. Deploy these updates as you would with any other Group Policy change.

Conclusion

Administrators have two easy methods to disable auto-updates for Citrix Workspace. This allows administrators the opportunity to vet the latest release(s) of Workspace before deploying to their entire organization. We should note that we actually deploy Workspace with both methods (disabled via silent install switch and GPO) and have seen no negative effects.

We hope this tutorial was helpful, and as always, reach out to Cosmistack for all of your IT management and consulting needs. Thanks for reading!