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UAG and Windows 8.1 or IE11

Update (05/15/2014): since the release of another service pack the following information could be depreciated. Read more about UAG 2010 SP4 here  

It seems like every time there's an operating system or browser update something UAG related goes wrong, considering this is an important infrastructure component that supports remote access services this is not cool! And, unfortunately, last series of upgrades - from Windows 8 to 8.1 and from Internet Explorer 10 to 11 - weren't an exception. There were a number of issues that weren't apparent at first, for example - a connectivity issue with UAG displaying Mobile Portal access or an RDP issue when published links would disappear from the portal.

Luckily, there are workarounds for most of these issues. The final resolution should lie with UAG 2010 SP4 that was rumored to be released in Q4 (but really should have been released before Win 8.1 or IE11 if you ask me).

Things like the aforementioned connectivity issue can be resolved by simply adding UAG to the compatibility view list as outlined here - http://bit.ly/17NFGlx. I would not bother with the emulation settings, results are very inconsistent and you have to change them every time you access UAG.

So, this leads me to a more fundamental, although officially unsupported, workaround. If you had published RDP links unexpectedly disappear, this one is for you. I must say I did not come up with it myself, I just followed the breadcrumbs:
  • After some research I found the following discussion containing a lot of good information and links - http://bit.ly/1gSff8b
  • Including a link to the following workaround, which involves modifying web.config file on the UAG server - http://bit.ly/13iMXxn
  • Which looked promising, but contained a number of inconsistencies that were corrected here - http://bit.ly/1aYjxIR
  • The last article not only explains how to properly apply the workaround, but also quite correctly points to the official TechNet article on how to modify the DetectionExpression - http://bit.ly/1e8IDmX 

This is not as complicated as it may sound, just don't forget to make backups of web.config files before modifying them, in case you need to roll back; and use a good text editor, something like Notepad++, to avoid problems with Unicode/formatting.

Until UAG 2010 SP4 :)       

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