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:
Citrix Certification, revisited, again! Solution-based certifications.
As 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.
It’s been a while!
Hi everybody, it’s been a while, I know. I posted my last article on March the 16th, and believe me, for someone who is sued to posting once a week and sometimes even more, it feels like an eternity! But it won’t be long now, there is some good stuff coming, I promise :-) I’ve been invited to some sneak preview sessions, been busy with organizing some stuff at work, talked to a few guys and gals at Citrix and I’ve been really busy working on my own (first) book, which is a lot of work! But also very rewarding and fun to do! The book will take me another few months but I’m sure I can find some time in between to share some of my thoughts with you guys. See you all soon!
Regards, Bas.
16 random reasons to (at least) consider Citrix XenMobile
Ever since Citrix acquired Zenprise and officially launched Citrix XenMobile it has been under constant development. Not to long ago Citrix announced version 8.6.1 (adding in PIN based authentication, multi domain and Site support, single join functionality and more) and I’m sure it won’t be long before we’ll see another version increment. BYOD has always been a hard concept to ‘get’ and manage and over the pas few years (it’s still relatively new) we’ve seen multiple vendors offer their ‘solution’ to take on the challenge. Since Citrix XenMobile is still considered as one of the leading parties, and probably will be for years to come, I though it would be a good idea to sum up some of its most important features.
Microsoft’s Windows XP is hot! Read why.
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. This may sound a bit weird to some, but Microsoft’s Windows XP is hot! Perhaps not as hot as it was when it was first released, but it’s not far of. Unfortunately not in a good way. Next year, in April 2014 to be exact, Microsoft Windows XP will no longer be officially supported. During this article I’d like to explore the end of life concept, what we can do to prevent potential issues and have a look at some of the possible migration and or upgrade scenarios we have at our disposal. Is it time to dump those fat clients? Adopt VDI? DaaS or Hosted Shared Desktops perhaps? Let’s see what’s out there.
Mobility based on Windows Server 2012 R2
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. Since I already discussed BYOD in general and, more specifically, I talked about Citrix XenMobile (see my previous article “BYOD…Beyond the Hype“ I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at some of the daily challenges we face when it comes to securely accessing our corporate data and applications, especially when mobile devices come into play, and to see what Microsoft has to offer as part of its new Windows Server 2012 R2 release to help us overcome some of these challenges.
BYOD… Beyond the hype
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for Intense School IT educational services. When I started out in the IT business just short of 15 years ago, mobile phones were a big deal, a privilege to have and use, and if you were allowed to use it privately, that basically meant you were the man! Nowadays it’s all about mobility, smart phones, tablets, net and notebooks, and the list goes on. Internet is cheap, wireless, and it’s everywhere, for most people today, it’s hard to imagine going even one day without their mobile device, whether it’s an iPhone, an Android phone, or some sort of tablet device. In this post, I’d like to focus on some of the challenges we as IT admins face when it comes to managing and securing, not only these (mobile) devices, but the accompanying corporate applications and data as well.