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How to use Athena?

In advance: installing the Citrix client

Use Athena

On your computer:

1. The URL for Athena is https://athena.ugent.be.
2. Log on using your UGent username and password (the same user details you use for UGent e-mail or Minerva).

On your mobile device:

1. Start the Citrix Receiver Application.
2. Use the following setup

MyAthena

You can group the applications you use most often in your "MyAthena" folder.
As a result you do not have to navigate to different folders to launch them.

Adding applications or (or removing applications from) your "MyAthena" folder:

• Navigate to the folder "Tools" and start "MyAthena Configuration".

• Tick the checkbox next to your most used applications and click "OK".

  

• Log back on to the Athena website.
  You now see a "MyAthena" folder with your favorite applications.

Launching an application

To launch an application single-click the desired icon. (do not double-click) Within a short while the launched application should appear on your screen.
The first time you run an application you may see the following message:

We advise to enable 'Full Access' and 'Never ask me again'. This enables you to open and write files to your local C:-drive.

Closing an application

When an application is no longer needed, you best close it.

• Closing an application is done in the usual way (specific to the application) or by closing the window in which the application runs.
• An application which hasn't been used for 4 hours is closed automatically.

Save or open files

The applications on Athena can access the next locations:

• The C-drive: This is the C-drive on your local computer.
• the H-drive: This is your home-directory on eduserv, moonrock or allserv. Opening the folder "My Documents" on Athena will also display the content of your home-directory.
• USB sticks (up to 5 pieces) are immediately visible.
  Please note: on Athena the drive letter H: is reserved for to your home directory, if your PC uses a drive letter H:, you will see that as H$:.
  Only USB drives can be accessed, no cdrom or floppy drives or internal hard drives.

Opening and saving files when in Athena can best be done, using the home directory (H-drive), this is faster than accessing your C-drive on your local computer.

If desired, additional network shares can be added (only for staff). To do so, send a mail to the helpdesk, containing the following information:
- Location of the share, e.g.: \\server.UGent.be\share.
- Desired character to identify the network drive, e.g. "S:". These characters are not allowed: A, B, C, H, X, Y and Z.

Please do not save files in the H:\Athena folder.
This folder is for settings (profile information) and temporary files and stored files can be deleted by the system.

Adding network shares

If you click "Home Drive" in the folder "Office", you will see a list of disks available to you.

You can mount shares for the duration of a session. Follow the procedure described in "Mount how?", "On a Windows device".

To mount shares permanently, you need to file a request (for staff only). The additional network shares are then added for you. Contact the helpdesk with the following information:

• Location of the share, eg: \\server.ugent.be\share
• Drive letter you wish to assign to the network share, such as "I:"

Following letters are not allowed: A, B, C, H, S, W, X, Y and Z.

Printing from an Athena application

From an application on Athena, you can send print jobs to the default printer on your local PC and to the "PDFCreator", a virtual printer that saves files as PDF.
If you wish to use another printer, you need to close all your Athena applications and then set up the appropriate printer as the default printer on your PC. Next, restart the application on Athena and print.
By printing from an application on Athena to the PDF printer "PDFCreator", you can convert a file to a PDF file.

Students can also print to the publicly available copiers in PC nodes and libraries, see: Printing at UGent for students .

The Citrix Connection Center

• How do you see the difference between applications running locally (= on your computer) and applications running on Athena (= central servers)?
• How can you verify if applications can communicate with each other?

When starting an application on Athena the Citrix Receiver icon appears in the taskbar (lower right of screen) .

It provides access to the Citrix Connection Center, where you can see active connections.
Right click on the icon and select 'Online Sessions' 'Connection Center'.

The following window appears.

Here you see on which servers you are logged on and which applications are running. At the bottom of the window you see " .. Servers used" " .. Remote Applications"

You can expand and collapse the view, using the + and - sign.

Below "Active" you see the names of the server(s) with which you have an active connection.
Below each server name you see the applications running on that server.

When two applications run on the same server, they can easily communicate with each other. In our UGent setting, the most recent versions of products (e.g. Office 2010 and Internet Exporer 8) have been installed together, on one server.

Time-out settings

Applications started on Athena are opened on a Citrix-server. To reduce the load on our servers, sessions that are inactive for 4 hours are closed automatically.

Setting permissions for local drives

You can change the permissions of your local drives through Athena by following steps:
Click the right mouse button on the Citrix Receiver icon in the lower right taskbar of your screen and click Connection Center.

The settings are per server each time. You select the server on which the program runs you want to reach the local disk, and then click Preferences.

Here you can set the permissions on your local disk. We recommend setting this to Read and write. You click on OK to confirm.

Changing the MS Office language

You can change the language via Athena - APPS - Office 2016 Language Preferences

How does it work?

Citrix technology is a network technology where the applications are installed on central servers. To use the applications you only need a Citrix client program on your device. The Citrix client program (the "ICA client" or "Citrix Receiver Application") exists for virtually all operating systems.
When using the Citrix technology, only screen images, mouse movements and keystrokes are sent over the network.

Who can access Athena?

Athena is available for all UGent students and staff and for all UZ personnel who have a UGent account.

Which software do you find on Athena?

By clicking on the 'Index', an overview (in PDF format) is generated of all possible folders and applications which are available. You do not automatically have access to all this software. Some packages are reserved for specific user groups, for licensing or security reasons.

What software you will be offered depends on the user group(s) you belong to. Whether you are a student or staff and to which faculty, service or department you belong: these factors make the difference.

The software is arranged in 3 main groups: Office, Academic and Tools.
Office: contains all office software for administrative tasks.
Academic: contains software for educational and research purposes.
Tools: contains programs that allow you to change settings in your Athena environment.

• Office

  This folder contains the standard office applications. Not everyone gets to see the same applications in this folder. Some administrative applications are only available for certain (groups of) employees.

  • Acrobat Professional (staff only)
  • MS Office: Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint + the Groene Boekje for staff
  • Internet Explorer
  • Home Drive: an explorer for your network drives
  • SAP Gui (staff only)
  • Specific administrative applications (staff only)

  Subfolder Extra Here more rarely used applications are housed as:

  • Adobe Reader
  • EndNote
  • MS Project
  • MS Publisher en MS Visio (staff only)
  • Reference Manager

  The subfolder Van Dale contains the Van Dale dictionaries

  The subfolder Office 2003 contains the 2003 release of MS Office.

• Academic

  Here you will find applications for research and educational purposes, including:

  • Maple
  • Matlab
  • SPSS
  • SAS
  • Spotfire S+
  • eviews
  • R Statistical Computing Environment
  • TeXnicCenter

  A number of applications are only visible if you belong to a particular faculty. Examples are:

  • IR: Aspen Plus 12.1, PP Rasta, ESA, Aldec AHDL, ChipScopePro, Modelsim, Xilinx
  • GE: Atlas of Human Anatomy
  • WE: Diva-GIS
  • DI: Neurosim, PMP, Win Episcope

  The subfolder Development holds developer applications as:

  • BlueJ
  • Dev-C++
  • LCC Win32
  • NetBeans IDE
  • Visual Studio Express (VB, C++, C# en J#)

  The subfolder Imaging contains software for viewing and editing images and photos, such as:

  • IrfanView
  • Paint.NET

• Tools

  programs that allow you to change settings in your Athena environment.

  • Office Language: allows you to customize the language of the MS Office applications.
  • Word Toolbars: allows you to select the toolbars for Reference Manager, EndNote and the Groene Boekje (staff) in Word.
  • Regional Settings: allows you to set the list separator and the decimal separator (period or comma) for all your applications on Athena.

What is the difference between “locally” installed applications and applications on Athena?

“Locally” installed applications are installed on the hard drive of your computer. You can use the locally installed applications only when the device is physically available.

The number of locally installed applications is limited. See: info about our offer, licenses, and the installation of software.

On Athena, you have many more applications at your disposal. You can use them from any device which has a Citrix client program installed. Working with Athena has the advantage that no software is loaded on your computer and that you can use the latest (or several) versions of applications. Functionally there is no difference between applications running locally on your computer and applications installed on Athena.

Communication between applications

Sometimes applications need to communicate with each other, for example, to print labels with Excel data via Mail Merge in Word. Or to insert citations ("cite-while-you-write") while writing in Word documents. In such case, EndNote or Reference Manager are accessed from Microsoft Word.

For applications to communicate with each other, they must run on the same computer.

In concrete:
you start all communicating applications on your computer
OR
you start all communicating applications on Athena

It goes without saying that, when only one of the applications is only available on Athena, you can work on Athena only. For more information read: The Citrix Connection Center.