As you might have noticed, lately it has been rather quite on basvankaam.com. But not to worry, I’m still here. While the number of blog posts from my end have been somewhat on the low side, I have kept myself busy *understatement* to say the least. Besides preparing three presentations (still a lot of work to do on those as well), which are all due in the next 2 months (Citrix Synergy included) I have been working on a big private project, a book!
My personal Community Edition… The best of September 2015!
The amount of useful, interesting and fun to read community content in the form of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, tools etc. being shared each month can be overwhelming sometimes. This is my second attempt; I did one for August as well, in collecting some of the most popular blog post shared within the EUC community. Have fun reading.
My personal Community Edition… The best of August 2015!
The amount of useful, interesting, fun to read, watch or listen to, community content in the form of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, presentations, tools etc. being shared each month can be overwhelming. It’s hard to keep track. Here are some of my personal picks during August. Enjoy!
Who needs Citrix Synergy Europe when we have events like E2EVC?!
Don’t get me wrong, I like Citrix, but every now and again companies, since their run by people, make mistakes, it happens. Normally you’d learn from them, but I guess there will always be exceptions. Dear Citrix, please listen to us, the community, and bring back Synergy to where it belongs (as well), Europe! Luckily we have E2EVC, which, even if Synergy would return, is ranked Nr. 1 by many, and since a couple of months I know why. Of course it’s hard to compare these types of events and maybe we shouldn’t, but let’s just say that Citrix leaves us no other choice. Read on please, it’s not all bad.
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 :-)
Installing and configuring Citrix StoreFront, the web.config file!
Not to long ago StoreFront replaced WebInterface (yes, it’s still officially supported till June 2015) and with it came a bunch of cool new and (very) useful features like Receiver for web and StoreFront multi site configurations for example, offering load balancing and HA capabilities, user mapping, application subscription synchronisation, optimal NetScaler Gateway routing and a few more. Also, we are no longer bound to an external database, this is now taken care of by the build-in Windows Extensible Storage Engine. The downside, at least for me, is that most, but not all, of these features need to be configured and or modified in the web.config file, comparable to the WebInterface.conf file we have with WebInterface.
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.
Citrix XenMobile MDM… To DMZ or not to DMZ? I might need your help one this one!
Average time to read: 12 minutesAbout four months ago I wrote an article on SSL offloading for the Citrix XenMobile MDM server and talked about how this new feature helps us in placing the MDM server on our more secure corporate LAN as apposed to the DMZ. And although I still feel that this is a valid, robust and decent set up, I must admit that the idea of placing the MDM server in the DMZ doesn’t sound that bad after all, considering all that comes into play. During my last article on XenMobile I gave it a bit more thought and just recently I discussed it with a few community members as well. Let’s just say that, for now, I’m in doubt. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the matter, I might need your help on this one!
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.