So Citrix Synergy has wrapped up in San Francisco and all the news is still buzzing around. Citrix showcased many new initiatives and products and intend to touch on a very specific one here… We’ll maybe a couple because of the integration it brings. Question for you guys. How many laptops, phones, iPad’s, etc., do you think were running around at this conference? My guess hundreds of thousands easily, expand that to all of San Francisco and it’s easily millions. Mobile data and even more so the mobile workforce is everywhere! The days of sitting in your cube all day has passed. People want their data and applications everywhere they go. Which raises a question… How the heck do we get all these different devices to have all of our data and applications all the time and actually function? That’s a good question, read more to find out! Read more >>

A health insurance provider in Tennessee was recently fined $1.5 million by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for a violation that occurred in October of 2009.  The violation, a loss of protected health information, occurred when 57 computer hard drives were taken from a training facility while employees were preparing to relocate.  The PHI data on the hard drives was also unencrypted.  The company also provided free credit reporting to nearly all of its 3.1 million customers since it could not determine the actual number of affected customers.

We all know the complexities and costs of managing large geographically separated fleets of desktops.  Just maintaining hardware, OS patches and AV software updates tend to consume all of the small amount of resources that most small to mid-size companies have in their IT budget.  And that doesn’t even start to add the complexities of encrypting data at rest on those fleets of pc’s.

An often talked about benefit of Virtual Desktops is data security.  However, I’m not sure that discussion sinks in deeply since we’re all worried about how much RAM we might need and how many IOPS we have to plan for in order to avoid the dreaded boot storm.  But, this benefit is real and in this case all the thieves would have walked away with COULD have been some dumb thin clients.  In the VDI world the PHI that was stored on these disks would have never left the data center and had any of the trainees or trainers stored PHI data on their desktops, the data would still have remained in the data center.

I realize there are long lists of pro’s and con’s along with ROI and TCO models that companies must go through prior to choosing or not choosing VDI but, these 1.5 million reasons go a long way to proving that VDI can provide many more benefits to businesses than just easier patch or software deployment tasks.

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

Read more >>

While building out a new XenApp 6.5 farm and handling the profiles through Citrix’s User Profile Management utility, I noticed some issues where the local profiles were not being deleted on logoff as I had configured them to be.

After doing some checking and verifying what I had set in the GPO was being “applied” configuration-wise to the server, I stumbled across Ctrix article which outlined our scenario, with the solution.

It turns out that when you install VMware tools, it includes a “Shared Folder” option, which remains locked on user logout and does not allow for the profile to be properly deleted. When this happens, the next time the user logs in to that server, it creates a new profile for them along the lines of “user.domain”, and increments that each time after, as in user.domain.001, user.domain.002, and so on.

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One of the hot new features in XenApp 6.5 is Session Pre-launch, which aims to drastically reduce application load time in the eyes of the user (and I say it this way because it doesn’t “technically” load them faster… well, read on).

In order to configure session pre-launch, you first publish an application like any other, with certain users, servers, etc. From here, you right click that application and choose “Pre-Launch Application”, which automatically creates and enables pre-launch capabilities for that specific app. In the console, it creates a new application object with the prefix “Pre-Launch”, and inherits the same settings you’ve configured on the original application.

When a user logs in to the Citrix Receiver, the configured application is automatically loaded up in the background, which successfully completes the process of logging in, running scripts, redirecting or roaming profiles, etc. This is all transparent to the user– they don’t even see the application. But if they click on the application that was originally created, it opens in the pre-launch session and in what appears to the user to be record time.

Read more >>