More than 13 million people now use Microsoft Teams every day — and more than 19 million use it weekly. (That’s nearly equivalent to the population of New York state!) Teams is a single, integrated app that is a hub for teamwork. It accelerates human-to-human communication  — specifically in terms of productivity and collaboration. Users chat, participate in video meetings, call, and collaborate on files.

During the course of our day, we not only interact with our team and colleagues but also with applications. These business applications are important to get key insights and to complete tasks. However, as we constantly switch between our collaboration tool and applications, this reduces productivity and increases frustration.

Now, imagine a scenario where you can stay within the Teams interface and interact with applications you use daily for work via a single bot.

Imagine asking all the questions and making the requests below and getting answers instantly from different applications without ever leaving the Teams interface.

  • Show me all my expense reports.
  • Who is the owner of the opportunity?
  • Show all open high priority tickets.
  • What are my pending purchase orders?
  • How many PTO days do I have?

Automate Your Tasks and Simplify Workflows with Teams

To simplify the work experience, Teams enables ISVs such as Citrix to build bots with APIs. They look just like any other team member whom you might interact within a conversation — except that bots appear as hexagonal avatar icons. You can interact with different bots to get data and insights across different apps. Examples include corporate travel booking apps, HR apps, or sales and marketing apps.

ISVs typically want to connect their own proprietary intelligent bots to interact with Teams. Citrix Workspace takes the idea of building an intelligent bot a step further. The Citrix Assistant for Microsoft Teams is one unifying bot across all your apps, so it eliminates the need to build or integrate multiple bots for your custom on-prem apps and SaaS apps. This means end users can use natural language queries to get answers and key insights without switching between multiple bots or switching to multiple apps. It also eliminates the need for multiple sign-ons or the need to configure multiple bots. Users can stay focused and engaged — without the distraction of having to log into multiple apps. This simplifies workflows across apps. See it in action here:

We are planning to tech preview our solution this quarter. When the new Citrix solution is generally available, you will be able to get answers from the most popular SaaS apps, and we will continue to add more integration and intelligent automation. 

Citrix is building meaningful integration with Microsoft Teams, from delivering an impactful experience in a virtual environment to automating workflows. With Citrix Workspace, collaboration in Microsoft Teams takes center stage.

Cut Down on Context Switching and Do More Engaging Work

Here’s another consideration: numerous times during the workday, you want to share a key insight or information with your team members. Sharing the information instantly is difficult because most often the applications don’t support sharing. Not only does Citrix Workspace organize your workday by bringing all the key insights and tasks into one personalized prioritized feed, it also enables quick and easy information sharing from Citrix Workspace to Teams for more effective collaboration. You can instantly share the status of your sales order from Microsoft Dynamics 365, a service ticket status from ServiceNow, or an updated Jira ticket notification in one click.

 

Optimize the Teams Experience in Your Virtual Environment

Citrix and Microsoft have enjoyed a 30-year collaboration and a shared vision. We have more than half a million joint customers, so our two companies are uniquely positioned and aligned to empower a cloud-enabled, mobile workforce. The combination of Citrix technology and Teams optimizes the performance of Teams, whether it is running in an Azure Virtual Desktop Windows 10 instance or on-premises. Together, Citrix and Microsoft are transforming how people communicate and collaborate in today’s modern workplace.

Our Citrix HDX optimization for Microsoft Teams blog post, published during Citrix Synergy, provided an in-depth description of how Citrix technology, when combined with Microsoft Teams, enables customers with virtual apps and desktops to have a better user experience. Users get a comprehensive feature set. We expect this solution will become generally available to customers within the next 30 days.

To learn more about this new Citrix solution for Microsoft Teams and the benefits it can bring to your organization, visit us in the Citrix booth (#1949) at Microsoft Ignite. And to learn more about Citrix Workspace, go to https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-workspace/.

For Citrix Investors

This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the impact of the global economy and uncertainty in the IT spending environment, revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products and services, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein. The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and is subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.