About two months ago I released my ultimate XenMobile survival guide. It’s packed with over 80 notes, general tips & tricks, best practices, recommendations and lessons learned from the filed with regards to XenMobile implementations. When people subscribed they would immediately receive their own personal copy (they still do by the way), which was sort of a test for me personally. As far as I am concerned my experiment worked out very well, over 200 people subscribed and it was well received throughout the community, thank you all very much! As of today it is available in my download section as well, of course it is still a 100% free and you won’t need to subsribe. It goes without saying that I’ll keep updating my current, as well as new, subscribers with interesting and useful content every now and again, or at least try :-)
Presenting Citrix XenApp 7.6 & Citrix XenDesktop 7.6… What’s new?!
Hi everybody, as you might have heard by now Citrix announced XenApp and XenDesktop version 7.6 build on top of the their new and improved Flexcast Management Architecture. I took the liberty to summarize some, if not all, of the newly announced features and enhancements that both products will bring to the table, sparing you the marketing propaganda surrounding it. If you feel I left anything out, drop me a line and I’ll include it, and of course this goes for the Citrix employees as well :-) Here goes:
The ultimate Citrix XenMobile survival guide! Get your copy here!
New mobile devices are being developed and hit the market one after the other, as a result the software able to manage all these devices is constantly being updated and or tweaked as well. It’s even though by Citrix that by the time we hit 2015 there will be four times more mobile projects than Windows, 37% of the global workforce will be mobile meaning that a total of around 15 billion mobile devices will be connected and thus need to be managed, at least that’s the assumption.
Continue ReadingCitrix Certification, revisited, again! Solution-based certifications.
Average time to read: 4 minutesAs you might recall, last year Citrix introduced a few new certification programs which also offered various upgrade paths, existing CCIAs and CCEEs could update to the new equivalent level by passing only one exam. The same applied to current CCA’s and CCAA’s. Eligibility to update required a, at that time, unexpired valid credential and the upgrade paths were available till the first versions of the CCE-AD, CCP-AD and CCA-AD exams were retired. During that time they also announced some ‘still to come’ networking and mobility orientated certification tracks. Just recently they’ve launched their new ‘solution-based’ certification tracks which now also include both mobility and networking, let’s see what they’re about.
XenMobile prerequisits, what do we need and how does it all fit together?
Average time to read: 14 minutesDon’t underestimate the power of prerequisites! No really, although this may seem like a straightforward topic, there’s a lot to think about, for example, we have to deal with firewall ports and protocols, IP numbers, DNS, AD, certificates, authentication, hard and software, licensing and more. By pre inspecting the prerequisites section, and thinking things through, not only will it tell you if you got what it takes, so to speak, it will also save you a lot of time once you start building and deploying your XenMobile infrastructure. And since I’ve been on the subject for the past few weeks, I thought I’d summarize some of the more important sections and subjects to focus on during the prerequisites and deployment phase, and ultimately show you how it all fits together (Visio included) from an architectural point of view.
Citrix Synergy 2014 Keynote wrap-up, here’s what’s new!
Average time to read: 9 minutesFinally, Synergy Keynote time! All eyes were on Mark Templeton as he took the Synergy stage for, what is supposed to be, the last time, since he’s resigning as Citrix CEO later this year. Unfortunately I wasn’t there to experience the buzz myself, but SynergyTV turned out to be a good alternative. At least it was warm where I was sitting :-) With around 5000 people, spread over 66 countries and over 2000 companies, attending Synergy in person and another 5000 following the Keynote live stream you good say that the event was a success before it even started, but to be honest, I didn’t expect anything less, especially with Mark resigning.
How to integrate StoreFront into XenMobile… And than what?!
Average time to read: 15 minutesAs most of you probably know, one of the main components that makes up Citrix XenMobile App edition is the App Controller. It provides us with our Mobile, Web and SaaS applications including any HTML5 based applications and web links. Applications first need to be signed, than wrapped, adding in the MDX binaries, before being uploaded to App Controller and assigned to your users. A process I’ll describe in more detail in one of my upcoming articles. During this blog I’d like to zoom in on the integration of StoreFront and highlight some of the options we have when it comes to using Worx Home and/or Citrix Receiver in contacting either StoreFront, App Controller or both. I’ll show you how we can launch, not only our Mobile, Web and SaaS apps, but Windows based desktops and applications as well, without using both platforms individually.
Book review! Citrix® XenMobile™ Mobile Device Management, published by Packt.
Average time to read: 8 minutesAs some of you might have noticed, Packt Publishing was randomly requesting (on Linked-In and facebook) IT professionals to review their, relatively, new book on Citrix XenMobile. Since Citrix study material (I really mean books here) can be hard to come by, I thought I’d give it a go as well. It’s my first book review, but that doesn’t stop me from being honest. I’ll try to judge from a professional, as well as a ‘beginners’, point of view. What kind of information am I presented with and does it really teach me something new?
Citrix XenDesktop 7.5… What’s new?!
Average time to read: 6 minutesYou know what’s funny? Last weekend (Saturday the 25th of January 2014 to be exact) when Citrix leaked its introduction video, with regards to the new Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.5 releases, it was all XenApp from there on, not a word, with a small exception here and there, on the new XenDesktop 7.5 release. I guess we were all just flabbergasted (what a cool word) with the re-introduction of XenApp, most of us anyway. Also, due to the rise of mobile computing, and mobility in general, It’s (and going to be) more and more about the applications then anything else, which, when you think about it, makes sense. I found some spare time and I’d like to spend a minute or two looking at some of the new features and functionality introduced with the release of Xendesktop 7.5.
NetScaler SSL Offloading for XenMobile MDM… Finally!
Average time to read: 9 minutesWell over a month ago Citrix released the XenMobile Device Manager SSL Offload Server Patch for NetScaler. And although this has been something we’ve been waiting for, although ‘we’ is probably still a relatively small group, for some reason I haven’t read or heard a thing about it. Perhaps XenMobile isn’t as popular as I thought or people just don’t mind putting their MDM machines in their DMZ’s, I know I would. Whichever the case may be, from now on you can securely place your MDM machine on your internal network without having to worry about potential unsecure connections, SSL only! Although I do highlight the XenMobile MDM server patch, the below is applicable to other sorts of (web) services as well.