On our citrix server we are going to be publishing several folders with office files for remote offices. A small number of our users need to be able to edit the files, and we have office licenses for them. For the rest of our users, they only need to be able to view and print the files. What I need to happen is; if user A, launches the app, she should see the folder and when she double clicks on an office document, the full office program opens the file for editing, if user B launches the app, she should see the folder, and when she double clicks on an office document it should open it with the free viewer.
Right now, office is installed on each server, full and viewer. Users who have office are put into an active directory group. Only members of that group can launch the full office product.
The simplest way to do this is via Citrix - publish one set of shortcuts to one user group, and one to the other.
If you have to control which application is launched by Windows for a certain user, you can set the file association on a per-user basis. You would have to script the setting of this (which you could do by GPO or something like login scripts).