The official blog for vWorkspace published an article over a year ago about how to publish automatic farm settings to vWorkspace client(s) via config.xml file, but it only concerned the usage of HTTP(S) protocol.

While this protocol is surely an usable one, and perhaps most common as well in normal circumstances, I was recently faced with a situation while doing PoC wherein no web servers were readily available and we had to be able to assign correct farm settings to the client regardless of who was logging on to workstation. After thinking a while, it occurred to me that from the AppPortal GUI you are able to download farm settings with file protocol, but this method wasn’t documented in the blog article or in the official documentation when it comes to using AutoConnectURL registry setting.

Hence I had to do little bit experimentation myself and came across this syntax which seems to enable automatic loading from the file-location, instead of more familiar HTTP:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Provision Networks\Provision-IT Client]
“AutoConnectURL”=”file://\\\\servername\\share\\”

Note that the backslashes are doubled in this regedit export, so the “human readable” form is: file://\\servername\share\

Hopefully this helps others in similar situation as I was facing!