Welcome to our monthly “What’s New in Citrix Workspace” blog post. This series gives you — our customers, partners, analysts, and industry leaders — a taste of the latest innovations from Citrix Workspace: XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, XenServer, and ShareFile.
May has been an exciting month at Citrix! Our highly anticipated Synergy 2018 conference provided the perfect time and place to showcase and unveil some of our newest products and features. Customers, Partners, and Citrites from all around the world came together for this big event, and it did not disappoint.
Here’s what’s new and fantastic, post-Synergy …
Bringing the Citrix Workspace experience to on-premises XenApp and XenDesktop sites:
At Citrix Synergy, we demonstrated the new Citrix Workspace app that will be available to all Citrix Cloud service customers. But many customers asked about integrating their on-premises XenApp and XenDesktop sites into the Citrix Workspace experience. Available as a tech preview today, existing Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop service, as well as trial customers, can aggregate their on-premises sites running 7.x (or even 6.5!) within the Citrix Workspace experience. More information is available in the Site Aggregation section of docs.citrix.com.
XenDesktop Essentials now available through the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Channel:
We reiterated our commitment to winning together with Microsoft at Synergy by announcing the availability of Citrix XenDesktop Essentials through the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Channel. This follows a recent announcement we made at Citrix Summit in January announcing XenApp Essentials availability through the Microsoft CSP Portal. With this announcement, Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (both Tier 1 & 2) are now able to purchase both XenApp Essentials and XenDesktop Essentials on behalf of their customers, capitalizing on the opportunity to deliver first class service and increase their revenue opportunities. For more information on incentives for Essentials, check out Derrick Thompson’s blog post: Get Rewarded when Customers Purchase Citrix Essentials on the Azure Marketplace.
Unlocking the power of hybrid cloud with the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance program:
There has been a lot of momentum around the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance program, with both Dell and StorMagic passing the program verification for their solutions. In addition, Cisco and HPE announced their participation in the program, with verified solutions expected later this year. Continuing this momentum, just last week, Lenovo verified its HCI solution in the program as well.
HCI simplifies infrastructure requirements and provides greater infrastructure scalability for your VDI deployments. These simplicity and scalability benefits delivered by the Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service led us to partner with leading HCI vendors. The intent was to make it even easier to get up and running with Citrix Cloud for your hybrid cloud VDI deployments. You consume XenApp and XenDesktop as a cloud service, while keeping your workloads on-premises.
Having a fully integrated, fully supported solution — from cloud service to on-premises appliance — provides reassurance when making a purchasing decision. The momentum in the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance program shows that leading HCI vendors are investing in the Citrix Cloud strategy and realize the value Citrix Cloud services brings to their customers.
Workspace Environment Management service coming to Citrix Cloud!
In the lead-up to Citrix Synergy, we announced the upcoming availability of the Workspace Environment Management service from Citrix Cloud. Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) adds incredible value to your XenApp and XenDesktop deployments by accelerating user logins, optimizing the user experience, and improving server scalability.
How could we make it even better? The Workspace Environment Management service will deliver all of the same benefits as on-premises Workspace Environment Management — without the need to install the infrastructure components or the database. Workspace Environment Management service will make it easier to harness all the benefits of WEM in an easy-to-use, readily available Citrix Cloud service. To see this new service in action, check out the recording of the Citrix Synergy session ‘Manage your user experience from Workspace Environment Management Service’ on Synergy TV.
Citrix Ready workspace hub advanced features are now available!
We made several announcements at Citrix Synergy about how we’re transforming the way people work. One of the more highly anticipated announcements was the availability of the advanced features of the Citrix Ready workspace hub, which include Citrix Casting, Skype RTME, and dual monitor support.
The Citrix Ready workspace hub is a tiny, powerful, low-cost endpoint that packs a punch! Citrix Casting allows users to roam their virtual app or desktop sessions seamlessly from their mobile device to any display connected to a workspace hub. This alleviates the need to remember usernames or passwords.
With Skype RTME integration, the workspace hub can function as a desk phone, further driving down hardware costs. However, we’re not leaving Citrix administrators with another device that they have to be concerned about managing. That’s where XenMobile comes into play.
With XenMobile UEM, Citrix admins have the ability to manage workspace hubs and BYO devices all from one single management console. You can read more about the features and how to get one from a previous blog dedicated to the Citrix Ready workspace hub.
Choose your own storage with ShareFile and integrate with leading CASB vendors:
ShareFile is serious about flexibility and security. ShareFile now offers ultimate flexibility by partnering with all major cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Organizations can leverage the productivity of ShareFile on the cloud storage platform that fits their needs. ShareFile is committed to security whether data is on premises or on the cloud. To help enterprises protect their data, ShareFile now integrates with McAfee (Skyhigh), Netskope and Avanan to deliver advanced DLP features in the cloud. By partnering with Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB), organizations can extend the security controls of their on-premises infrastructures to the cloud.
Coming Soon: Day One support for Microsoft Server 2019:
With the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows Server 2019, we are pleased to announce that Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop will support Windows Server 2019 on Day One. This level of commitment to Windows Server 2019 from Citrix empowers our customers and prospects to move as aggressively or conservatively as their businesses dictate. For more information on the benefits of Windows Server 2019, check out the recent article in the Microsoft Windows Server blog.
Automating Workspace delivery with the Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow:
During the Keynote session at Citrix Synergy 2018, we showcased not only how we’re providing world class experiences for the end-users of our technology, but also how we’re providing a world-class experience for the IT administrators. Our goal is to make their lives easier. With the proliferation of devices and applications in the enterprise, the Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow aims to do just that by automating tasks that IT faces on a daily basis so admins can focus their attention elsewhere.
With the new Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow, out-of-the-box workflows help solve some of the more time-consuming initiatives such as onboarding employees, requesting Citrix services, managing incidents/problems for provisioned resources, and more. This reduces SLAs from weeks to hours or minutes. The Citrix ITSM Adapter will be available as a technical preview in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for future blogs to stay up-to-date on its availability.
Citrix Cloud: Coming Soon to Azure Government:
Microsoft and Citrix jointly announced that Citrix Cloud will be coming to the Azure Government Cloud Platform in 2018. While XenApp and XenDesktop Service had a tech preview to enable customers to provision VDA’s on Azure Government cloud, this announcement will enable the Citrix Cloud management plane to operate in the Azure Government cloud. This is important to government agencies that require both the management plane and the virtual app and desktop workloads to be hosted on Azure Government and the security enhancements that Azure Government provides. Additional details are now available on the Microsoft Azure blog and a recent Citrix Synergy announcement blog post.
Coming Soon: Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.18!
The latest updates to XenApp and XenDesktop are coming soon to a Citrix download page near you. We are giving you a sneak preview into some of the new, enhanced features included in this release:
- New HDX enhancements that optimize the user experience — Citrix continues to optimize the user experience with a variety of HDX enhancements coming in 7.18 including optimizations for webcams, smart cards, Surface stylus pen preview, and more. However, our new progressive display enhancements that monitor network performance and automatically adjust to prioritize user interactivity over image quality will be a big win for remote users in challenging network conditions.
- Automate system health checks with Application Probing and Reporting — Platinum edition admins will be able to install multiple probes in branch offices to periodically test app launches and assess overall site performance. The results are then showcased within Citrix Director.
- Adding more visibility to the user login process within Citrix Director — Director gives admins great insights into the overall user login; however, in the past, a majority of the login process typically fell within the ‘interactive session’ phase. Now Director will provide an additional breakdown of interactive session details to help IT admins keep login times at a minimum.
- Making it easier to troubleshoot VDA registration issues from Citrix Director — Citrix Health Assistant tool was a separate tool that Citrix provided to run a series of tests to help troubleshoot unregistered VDAs. Now, Director provides quick access to Health Assistant tool from Director to improve VDA troubleshooting.
- Machine Creation Services for Linux app and desktop VDAs — Customers looking to incorporate Linux apps and desktops into their sites will be able to utilize either Machine Creation Services or Provisioning Services to rapidly deploy Linux resources to their users.
- Built-in Default Alert Policies for Citrix Director — Citrix will now provide default alert policies that an admin can simply turn-on to set warning and critical thresholds for various conditions.
We will have a dedicated What’s New with XenApp and XenDesktop blog post upon launch of 7.18 with detailed feature enhancements, so stay tuned.
That’s a wrap! For those of you who were able to attend Synergy, we hope you enjoyed seeing everything that we’ve been up to. And if you couldn’t make it, we’re happy we could give you a little window into what was announced and what has shipped since then. Looking forward to showing you “What’s New with Citrix Workspace” in June. Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Josh Thompson
@JoshMThompson
