General Announcements and News

Citrix Appoints Kirill Tatarinov as President and CEO

Citrix announced that Kirill Tatarinov has been appointed President and CEO, effective January 25, 2016. A veteran Microsoft executive, Mr. Tatarinov will also join the Citrix Board as a director at that time.

Citrix Acquires Comtrade’s SCOM Management Packs IP

The acquisition of Comtrade’s management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) provides Citrix users with comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring, delivering single pane of glass visibility into the entire Citrix desktop virtualization, network and mobility environment. Customers can proactively monitor the quality of the Citrix end user experience and infrastructure health performance across market-leading products, such as XenDesktop, XenApp, XenMobile and NetScaler, all while leveraging the existing monitoring platform.

Citrix and Microsoft Unveil “v2” Solution for Skype for Business

HDX RealTime Optimization Pack 2.0 delivers a truly native Skype for Business UI experience. And it adds numerous features to what was previously available in version 1.8. HDX RealTime Optimization Pack 2.0 is more than just a technology solution. Citrix and Microsoft provide a joint support model for this solution. And each vendor can open trouble tickets with the other vendor as needed.

Our Best Platinum Edition for XenApp and XenDeskop Yet!

This blog post focuses on rolling up today’s keynote announcements that specifically add new value to XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum editions – and by extension, the Citrix Workspace Suite. Collectively, they raise the bar even higher on simplifying the management and delivery of apps, and monitoring and optimizing app, desktop and user performance, and provide compelling reasons to upgrade to our most value-packed edition ever.

Citrix Makes XenApp/XenDesktop & Workspace Cloud Annoucements

Citrix has made several announcements at the company’s Summit, all of which are focused on their XenApp/XenDesktop and Workspace Cloud product lines, offering new features and packages for large enterprises and channel partners.

Mobile payments will account for a third of consumer-to-business transactions in 2016, says Citrix

In a series of predictions for 2016 Mikko Disini, director Product Marketing at Citrix, examines the pace of change in network functions virtualisation (NFV), security and mobile payments.

Chalan Aras Explains Why Company is Uniquely Positioned for SD-WAN

This year should see the mass-market adoption of SD-WAN, a technology that meets the needs of today’s applications by providing large and reliable bandwidth. Citrix has a unique slant on all this, Aras said, given it has offerings and expertise both on the enterprise application front and in terms of Layer 4 through 7 networking products.

Collaboration: With Citrix ShareFile & Microsoft Office Online, It’s Simple

Citrix ShareFile is always looking for new ways to integrate with the intention of increasing the value we bring to our customers. In today’s world, collaboration is the key to getting many tasks done. Citrix recognizes this, and that’s why many Citrix ShareFile customers are taking advantage of the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents directly from the web application through our Microsoft Office Online integration, announced earlier this year (part of Microsoft’s Cloud Storage Partner Program).

Citrix Call Home Technology Preview

Citrix introduced the Call Home (v1) technology in the XenApp 7.6.300 VDA in Sep 2015 to collect a core set of diagnostic data for troubleshooting. This version required manual interaction to upload information to the Citrix Insight Services. Manually interacting with each VDA does not scale for large deployments and forces administrators to develop their own strategies to trigger uploads. This Tech Preview release offers automated scheduled uploads to alleviate this pain-point.

A Running Start for XenServer in 2016

The year started with a significant XenServer product release (v6.5) containing, amongst other things, new product editions, some new features and a raft of performance and scalability improvements. XenApp customers (license holders) were also, for the first time, entitled to use XenServer features without needing a XenDesktop license. Now, all Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop customers have access to licensed and supported XenServer features as a part of their existing Citrix license agreements.

Citrix Workspace Cloud: Broader Reach, New Pricing, Updated Packages

Citrix Workspace Cloud offers the simplest, fastest, and most flexible way to deliver secure mobile workspaces on the market today. Customers offered feedback in how we can improve our pricing and package options. So later in Q1 you’ll see Citrix decrease the annual subscription price for ourVirtual Apps and Desktops package, as well as a reduced price to our Integrated Apps and Data Suite package.

Citrix NetScaler CPX a Lightweight Alternative for Cloud Providers

Citrix NetScaler, a full-fledged application delivery controller (ADC) has recently introduced a new, lighter version of itself. Made to fit in small-scale cloud applications and container-style deployments, the new CPX is a micro-form of NetScaler.

Best Practices/Reference Architecture Documents/Blogs

Deep Dive: XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7 Zones

One of the new features of the 7.7 release of XenApp and XenDesktop is the ability to define ‘zones’ in a site and to place elements from the site into different zones. The motivation behind this feature is described in a separate blog, but this article goes a little deeper into how this all works and what the implications are when you put items such as controllers, hypervisor connections and catalogs into zones.

Deploying NetScaler Gateway in ICA Proxy Mode

This document takes the user through the steps of configuring a NetScaler Gateway and Storefront for a XenApp/XenDesktop VDI solution. The document first describes the steps for configuring the NetScaler Gateway component and then, for configuring the Storefront.

Desktop Notification Tool For Citrix XenDesktop

With Director 7.7, XenDesktop administrators have the capability of configuring policies and conditions that will alert administrators when the configured threshold has reached in the XenDesktop 7.7 environment.

Setting up XenDesktop 7.7 against Microsoft Azure

Setting up integration between XenDesktop and Microsoft Azure  is now a supported integration in 7.7. This integration allow us to provision virtual machines directly from Studio.

How to Deploy Skype for Business & Lync 2013 in VDI Environment

With the release of the Feature Pack 2 for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6, we now support audio and video optimization for Microsoft Skype for Business and Lync 2013 Client and Server deployments using the Citrix HDX RealTime Optimization Pack for Lync. This level of Lync optimization is unique in the market. The latest revision of the Optimization Pack adds support for MAC endpoints in addition to our support for Windows endpoints and 32 bit Linux endpoints.

Integrating Citrix XenMobile with Azure Active Directory

With the release of Citrix XenMobile 10.3, we are providing integration with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to modernize enterprise mobility on Windows 10. With this integration, we are simplifying the MDM enrollment flow for Windows 10 devices. When a user joins their Windows 10 device to Azure AD, it will automatically be enrolled with a management server (i.e. Citrix XenMobile).

SSO to Office365 with NetScaler Unified Gateway

This blogpost shows you how-to configure Office365 as a SaaS Application in a Citrix NetScaler Unified Gateway. We will also make use of a SAML Based Authentication to realize a Single Sign-On experience. To get this working it is necessary that your Office365 Account is configured as a SAML Service Provider.

Director 7.7: Managing and Configuring Alerts & Notifications Using Powershell

With Director 7.7, you have the capability of configuring policies and conditions that will alert you when the configured threshold is breached in a XenDesktop 7.7 environment. This post will help you configure your proactive alerts and notifications using the POSH cmdlets.

Proactive Troubleshooting & Predictive Trending with Director 7.7

It may be difficult for admins to constantly monitor the Director console for issues, but it’s important, as problems can arise at any point in time. So, what can we do? Using the Proactive Notifications and Alerts feature, not only an administrator can be notified when an issue arises, he can proactively look for warning signs by configuring thresholds and severity against conditions.

XenMobile Security Considerations

Over the course of the last year or so, I have been hearing IT organizations of all shapes and sizes focused more and more on one key concept … SECURITY! If your organization is like many of those we have been working with lately, you are probably wondering which of those knobs to turn and checkboxes to select so that your XenMobile deployment is ‘secure’. Or maybe you just want to know what other customers are doing on this front and what you should be thinking about.

Turbo Charging Performance with PVS 7.7

We snuck something into the 7.7 code that can really improve target device streaming.  And it’s not like streaming performance was poor before, it’s just better now. Why? The key PVS driver, which takes over after the bootstrap, is now optimized for multi-core systems.

SCOM Alerts in Citrix Director

With Director 7.7, you can view the alerts from SCOM server for various management packs on director. This will help the XenDesktop admins to manage the infrastructure on which the XenDesktop is built upon without needing to go to another console like operations manager console.

Support Articles/Security Bulletins

XenApp and XenDesktop Servicing Options (LTSR) FAQ
Lync/Skype Autodiscovery Support – HDX RealTime Optimization Pack 1.8
How to Install XenDesktop/XenApp 7.x Controller Hotfixes
XenApp Servers Do Not Start Automatically After Disabling Maintenance Mode on Delivery Group
XenMobile Enterprise set up in double-hop DMZ deployment.
XenMobile 10.3: How can VPP apps be installed on devices without having Apple id configured.
Webcams Not Working in XenDesktop, Being Redirected as Optimized USB
FAQ: Connection Leasing in XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6
How do I Configure HDX Insight?
How-To Configure NetScaler to do Content Switching to LoadBalance DNS Requests to different DNS Servers based on Domain Name’s
How to Configure LDAP Authentication on NetScaler
How to Create a New Citrix Account ID/Org ID

Upcoming Events

2016 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition (Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2016) – Register Now
Citrix TechEdge (May 23, 2016) – Register Now
Chicago User Group Community (Feb 4, 2016) – Register Now
Netscaler Master Class (Feb 3rd, 2016) – Register Now
5 Things VMware Doesn’t Want You to Know About Horizon View…(Feb 11, 2016) – Register Now
XenApp and XenDesktop Tech Update (Feb 17, 2016) – Register Now
Delivering Apps as a Service Courtesy of Central IT (Feb 25, 2016) – Register Now
Secure Remote Access to Windows, Web and SaaS Apps (Recorded) – Register Now
Desktop and Apps Master Class – January (Recorded) – Register Now
SDN Update: Customer Strategies for Software Defined Everything (Recorded) – Register Now

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