This blog post was co-authored by Meerah Rajavel, Chief Information Officer at Citrix.

Citrix Workspace helps employees get their best work done through a secure, unified, and intelligent interface. Integrations with commonly used applications, built right into the Workspace or developed by partners or internally, are helping to drive productivity and engagement, ensure a great employee experience, and support return-to-office initiatives, including our own.

Citrix Workspace Integrations and Microapps

Citrix Workspace platform’s integrations with popular applications are delivered via microapps that allow employees to complete an action in their Workspace feed, and we have hundreds of microapps available out of the box. Let’s take a quick look at four new integrations for Citrix Workspace.

Microsoft Teams

With our consistent, secure Teams experience for Citrix Workspace, you can easily share information from the Workspace to Teams for more effective collaboration; customize how Workspace notifies you of Teams messages; quickly create, start, or join meetings; and create new Teams channels in Workspace.

Slack

Slack integration helps to minimize application switching, which can sap productivity. Relevant Slack content shows up in your Workspace feed, and you can push important information to Slack from your Workspace. You also can send messages to specific channels, flag mentions with corresponding actions in the Workspace, initiate calls, and more.

Zoom

Remote work has led to increased adoption of Zoom. With our integration, you can create new Zoom meetings, list upcoming meetings, and much more, all within the Workspace.

Google Identity and Google Workspace

Citrix Workspace supports seamless integration with Google Identity, giving employees easy access to Google Workspace apps. And it’s all integrated into the broader Google ecosystem via the Citrix Workspace app for Chrome Enterprise, providing unified access to all enterprise resources and apps on Chrome devices and integration with Chrome enterprise security.

Custom Microapps

Our out-of-the-box integrations deliver amazing value, but we know custom microapps that meet your specific business needs are critical to getting the most out of Citrix Workspace. We’re working to enable organizations and partners to create custom microapps that remove complexity for employees and provide infinite extensibility, helping to accelerate innovation and improving employee experience and productivity.

We’ve seen incredible custom microapps that include workflows for self-service onboarding and rapid population of lead data. These custom workflows are not trivial, and the time saved adds up. Giving time back to employees to focus on value-creating work can have a significant impact for your business.

The Citrix Workspace platform enables anyone to develop integrations and microapps to connect the Workspace to a system of record. Developers can orchestrate and automate complicated business processes and workflows in hours, not weeks or months. And we have you covered, even if you can’t develop apps internally. We have an entire ecosystem of Citrix partners, ISVs, and systems integrators that are doing this work for customers.

Integrations and microapps are at the core of the Citrix Workspace experience. On our Citrix Workspace Summit page, you can learn how organizations can modernize and futureproof their digital workspace, realizing rapid innovation and time to value and driving higher employee productivity and engagement.

Citrix’s Return to Office

Companies that already had a cloud presence in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic have had an easier time adapting to support a workforce that’s almost entirely remote. That’s where Citrix found itself in the early stages of the pandemic.

In fact, we had critical building blocks in place in terms of technology, culture, and employee mindset. We were able to support a great employee experience and productivity even in a time of rapid change, and we’re leaning on that in our return-to-office efforts.

On the technology side, we focus on four Cs when approaching employee experience and productivity:

  • Connectivity: Employees must have secure, high-performing connections to the tools and resources they need. At Citrix, we’re using our own technology — Citrix SD-WAN, Citrix ADC, and Citrix cloud services — to scale resources in the cloud in a matter of seconds, which is just what we did when COVID-19 hit.
  • Content: Employees need access to information and the ability to share content, no matter where they are. Citrix Workspace delivers in a unified, secure way, and is optimized for hybrid work, whether you’re in the office, working from home, on your laptop, or on a mobile device.
  • Collaboration: Our digital interactions are replacing physical collaboration. Citrix supported hybrid work for many employees before the pandemic, but we needed to turn up the dial on these tools and resources to enable hybrid work for everyone and support easy collaboration.
  • Culture: While technology is important to returning to the office, our success at bringing people back to the office while continuing to support remote work and enabling productivity relies heavily on our culture. That requires a close partnership between IT and HR.

We know employees are experiencing unprecedented change in the way they work and at home and in their personal lives. And while IT might want to roll out new tools or policies, working closely with Citrix HR leaders has helped us understand how to get employees to adopt and embrace new approaches and new tools. At Citrix we have an “always-on” approach to employee listening and engagement, which helps us to understand what they feel good about or what they have concerns about, even at a granular level.

This type of feedback helps to shape IT’s work. For example, giving employees a way to share their remote work experience or understanding which tools distinct employee groups need to be most productive — these insights help with decision making that shapes the employee experience.

Citrix’s COVID-19 Self-Certification Microapp

Citrix has locations around the globe where workers have started to return to the office. Still, hybrid work remains a critical part of our approach, and we’ve had to think about how to safely bring people back to the office so they can have a great employee experience.

That’s why we’re leveraging the Citrix Workspace platform to deliver a health self-certification microapp for our own employees. In Citrix Workspace, an employee chooses their country, certifies they don’t have a fever, haven’t been diagnosed with COVID-19, haven’t experienced any symptoms related to COVID-19, and have not recently traveled outside the country. They choose their office, submit their self-certification, and are given a certificate valid for that day to present to Citrix on-site security. It’s a small thing, but it’s an important part of keeping employees and their families safe when returning to an office.

Learn more on our Citrix Workspace Summit page about how Citrix is leveraging Citrix Workspace and microapps to help employees return to the office.