Happy Pi Day readers!  It’s day 011 of FLISH MADNESS and we are continuing our conversation on End User Computing.

To review, we discussed yesterday that three things are needed for EUC to be successfully deployed in a corporate IT environment.

1.  Device agnosticism aka BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

2.  Application abstraction / Modern Application development (HTML 5)

3.  Secure MDM (Mobile Device Management)

We went in depth about topic number one yesterday.

Today we will discuss topic number 2:

Application abstraction / Modern Application development

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EUC part 1 of 3

Its day two of FLISH MADNESS and today’s topic is End User Computing.

Recently I was on plane flight coming back from Las Vegas and I looked around half way through the flight to see that 80 % of the people around me were using some type of tablet computing device.  I thought to myself the post PC era is truly underway.  But, we have a ways to go.  First and for most we still have too many devices per person.  Case in point, I carry my laptop, iPad and iPhone to every meeting I go on.  Ideally we would combine at least two of these devices if not all three.

I envision a world where we have one device (call it an identity disc) where we jack into computing resources (public, private, personal cloud) as needed.  Some of us are already taking steps in this direction.  For example, the Cisco Cius can be “docked” into a station where you would have the full keyboard, monitor and mouse capabilities of a traditional desktop.  From there you could launch native applications, VDI from Citrix or VMware or some type of legacy application presentation.

End User Computing is one of the most spoken buzz terms across all tech industry verticals today.  The actual meaning of the term may depend on whom you are speaking with.  But what it boils down to is empowerment for users of the users and by users.  In IT we no longer live in a world where we have the luxury to control what end point device the users bring to work.  We do have the ability to control the corporate data, how the data gets to the end user (including how it is presented), and finally how the data is secured.

To summarize this line of thought, EUC needs three things to be successfully deployed in an IT environment.

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The ACC tournament is officially over and the NCAA tournament is about to begin.  The weather is warming up; the flowers are blooming.  I love this time of year.  That’s why I am bringing you readers “FLISH MADNESS” this week.  Five days, Five blogs, all Flish!

For the first blog of the week I am going to go over the totally awesome Xen App Citrix Mobility Pack.

“With this feature installed, XenApp shared desktops are automatically re-skinned for more intuitive touch-friendly use on tablet devices.  Tablet Optimized Desktops work with the currently available Receiver for iOS and Receiver for Android.

The pack also provides users with a true Native Device Experience  for hosted apps by recognizing the type of endpoint operating system and enabling mobile device features such as auto-keyboard popup, local selector controls, and auto-scrolling.  The new Receiver for Android is required to take advantage of these enhancements.

This pack is required to make the unique capabilities of a mobile device such as GPS, camera and other sensors available to application developers who may use it in conjunction with the XenApp 6.5 Mobile Application SDK to create custom, mobile-friendly applications hosted by XenApp in the data center. “

Let’s take a look.  (all screen shots taken from my iPad, thanks Ian!).

The First thing you’ll notice when you login to an optimized shared desktop is that the start bar is at the top and the application short cuts are centered at the top of the screen.

All applications open with one “touch” as you would expect them too natively on a mobile platform.

When you press the navigation arrow at the top you get the following drop down.

• The home button brings you back to the Citrix Receiver login screen where you can log into another desktop or launch a Citrix “presented” app.
• The Blue Tooth button allows you to pair a BT device with the desktop
• The arrow keys bring up the four directional arrow keys.
• The pointer brings up the mouse pointer to interact with OS or apps if needed.  Though while just using Microsoft office apps I saw no need for this.
• The magnifier enlarges any thing that’s in the diameter of the magnifier ring.
• The gesture button shows all the very nice touch functionality built in to the mobility pack.  My personal favorite is the three finger tap that brings up the native iPad keyboard.

• The switch button allows you to go back and forth between the native Windows start bar and switch between applications.

The last thing to note is the optimized task bar at the bottom of the screen. The arrow buttons allow the navigation for browsing when you have multiple applications open that span larger than what can fit on the one screen.

As I test more with this solution I will post additional findings.  For me the biggest take away is the “smoothness” at which the applications and desktop behave with native mobile like behavior!