Throughout my time at Liquidware Stratusphere UX was always one of the favorites, during customer visits, demo’s, tech sessions, you name it. Not really surprising, since detailed insights into what’s happening from a technical as well as user perspective is a very important part of the end user experience and ongoing (never ending, it seems) management puzzle. This applies to on-premises as much as it does to various cloud environments, never mind which one.
Focus on Citrix (or VMware, or Microsoft) – not printing!
I’ve always had a big interest in printing. It’s something I have written about and presented on extensively in the past. Throughout the years I have had my fair share of failure when it comes to printing in Citrix/RDSH/VDI based environments (who hasn’t?) so I decided to dig in a bit deeper. Not too long ago I got introduced to Tricerat, a very simple, yet effective and efficient solution when it comes to taking care of all things print related within Citrix environments, or any other type of environment, for that matter. Throughout this post I’d like to share with you how they simplify print management and let you, the IT Administrator, focus on Citrix – not printing!
What’s your strategy? Windows 10 Servicing Branches, Deployment Rings & tooling
With the introduction of Microsoft Windows 10 also came a couple of new ways to deploy and maintain Windows installations, this is what Microsoft refers to a Windows as a Service, or WaaS. Meant to make the life of the IT professional a little easier. As you might know, Windows 10 is supposed to be the final version of Windows, and thus new functionalities and features will be delivered in smaller incremental updates, two to three times per year as opposed to every 3 to 5 years prior to Windows 10, when a new version of Windows was released. This also introduces a couple of challenges when it comes to upgrading, updating and maintaining new and current installations. For this they came up with WaaS as mentioned earlier. Let’s have a look at what this means from a servicing and update perspective.
Two factor (SMS) authentication — done right with SMSPassword!
I have always been a fan of two factor authentication, or 2FA in short. Almost all companies and customers I have worked for and with used it in some shape or form. Especially SMS based 2FA — from an administrative perspective it is easy to set up, configure and maintain (if it isn’t you might want to consider switching vendors) and next to that it is also extremely user friendly and secure, when properly implemented that is. And of course, there is no need for any additional (expensive) third party tokens.
The Citrix Long Term Service Release vs. the Current Release. What’s (really) new?
Not that long ago (during Summit 2016 to be exact) Citrix introduced two new XenApp / XenDesktop servicing options, the LTRS, which stands for Long Term Service Release and the CR a.k.a. Current Release. And while this is sort of a big deal, it does tend to confuse people on what to expect when it comes to Citrix support. This post is meant to clarify a couple of misconceptions that have been slowly formed during the last two months or so.
How to configure zones in XenDesktop and XenApp 7.7 plus some extra’s!
Yes, Zones are back! This seems to be a very popular quote on Twitter and Linked-In ever since Citrix released XenApp/XenDesktop 7.7 last week. And to honest, I’m exited as well. Are these the zones we were, or are used to in XenApp 6.5? No. But they’re close. After I installed XenDesktop 7.7 the morning after its release, I had 3 zones up and running within 5 minutes, and that’s only because I didn’t read the ‘manual’ up front. Let’s have a look and see what we come up with along the way. I took the bullet approach on this one. Scroll down for some screenshots on how to configure XenDesktop / XenApp zones.
Liquidwarelabs ProfileUnity & FlexApps overview. Version 6.5 soon to be released!
Last week Jason E Smith, who is the Global Director of User Management and Performance Solutions within Liquidwarelabs, showed and told me a thing or two about ProfileUnity, their User Environment Manager, including their application layering a.k.a. FlexApp solution. They are on the verge of releasing ProfileUnity / FlexApp version 6.5 (as of early October) which currently holds the status of Release Candidate 1, which is the one Jason showed me.
The glass is half full… 50+ reasons why I think it might be time to move to XenApp 7.6!
In this post I’ll list a whole bunch of reasons why I think it might be time to move your current XenApp IMA setup onto the new and enhanced FMA, which, depending on your license, could be either XenApp and/or XenDesktop. I’m sure you’ll find some of my arguments a bit to far-fetched or perhaps plain stupid even, and that’s fine. Feel free to comment. As the title implies I’m trying to take a positive approach here, so I won’t focus on any of the features (still) left out. Eventually we will all migrate, it’s only a question of when. Note that the below comments are in a random order.
The ultimate Citrix XenMobile survival guide! Download now, no subscription needed.
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 :-)
Control, or control not. There is no manage! Free VMworld Europe tickets!
What a great title for a blog post, don’t you agree? To bad I didn’t came up with it myself, my friends at VMTurbo did. You’ve probably heard of them, they are the ones that enable virtualization teams to control complex environments and at the same time enhance the performance of VMware, Hyper-V, RHEV and Citrix orientated architectures and deployments. The reason for this blog is twofold, first of all I would like to spend a few minutes briefly introducing VMTurbo, and secondly, as some of you might already know, they love to give a way free stuff, and I’m not talking about a baseball cap or a T-shirt, read on …