UK Citrix User Group Winter 2020 meeting (watch on demand)

Posted by on November 23, 2020 No comments

Following the incredible success of the online meetings so far this year, we are delighted to announce that our next meeting will also be virtual and will take place on Monday December 7th from 10am to 4pm GMT.

The meetings are free to attend, available to a global audience, streamed via an interactive platform where you can interact with fellow delegates, sponsors and the presenters.

When

Monday December 7th
10:00am to 4.3pm (followed by vBeers social via Gotomeeting)

Where

As before, once you have registered, you will be sent a link to access the event platform a week before the event so that you can familiarise yourselves with the technology and check out our sponsors, as well as take part in the leaderboard challenge and create your own schedule. We will feature the usual EXCELLENT content from engaging speakers and a mix of sessions from Citrix, UKCUG, sponsors & the community.

  • An event run by the user group community for the community
  • Network with colleagues via the Community Chat and 121 messaging
  • Network with our fabulous sponsors and peruse their collateral
  • Collect swag and be in with a chance to win some awesome prizes!

The agenda will follow soon, in the meantime, get involved by using #UKCUG on Twitter.

We’re looking forward to meeting you all virtually!

Provisional Agenda

10:00 Welcome & News  – UKCUG

10:15 WVD or Citrix? WVD? Citrix? Or both? Let me help you decide….. Neil McLoughlin (CTA Session)

11.00 Sponsor

11.15  Citrix Security vs Usability – 2.0 – James Rankin & Dave Brett (CTP double act)

12.05 Comfort break

12:15  Sponsor

12.30 Best practices for ‘Work From Anywhere’ user experience monitoring – Berry Haveman (Community session)

13:15 Lunch break

13:45 Update on MSIX – Tim Mangan (CTP session)

14.30  Sponsor

14.45 Citrix USB optimized vs Generic – Ray Davis (Community Session)

15:30 Power managing Citrix workloads using PowerScale – Leee Jeffries (CTP session)

16.15 Quiz

16.30 Open discussion and vBeers

Submit your session idea

Have a good topic, project or case study you’d think would be of interest to others? Submit your session idea for consideration for a future meeting

Sponsors

Our meetings are free to attend thanks to our generous sponsors. You’ll be able to contact them all, through the virtual meeting platform on the run up to the event, during event day and for 30 days after. Please do take the time to watch their videos and download their content.

How Liquidware Can Help to “Burst Scale” Your Citrix Work From Home Environments

Posted by on October 31, 2020 No comments

This is a guest post by Morteza Esteki, VP Sales, EMEA Liquidware

Frankly, we were amazed at how many of our Citrix customers contacted us at the start of the pandemic lockdown in early March, asking for our assistance to rapidly move their users to work from home.

I’d like to share one particular customer story with you. They needed to move 10,000 users to Citrix running on Azure to ensure seamless operations to keep worldwide trade going. While Citrix and Azure were already operational, they were not production ready at scale. So, they quickly conducted a ProfileUnity and FlexApp proof of concept and, by March 8, a decision was taken to execute their Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for 2,000 users to work from home and be production ready by March 11!

This was an extraordinary aggressive timeline and how the timeline panned out is detailed below:

Day 1 – ProfileUnity Installation with ProfileDisk to capture user settings and data immediately.

Day 2 – Golden image update highlighted VHDX issue. FlexApp deployed to add new applications as new user groups emerged.

Day 3 – Production Ready, with initial testers. ProfileUnity configuration to complete profile disk settings.

Day 4 – Go live with first production users. Stratusphere UX monitors situation from an executives’ standpoint and IT Management can react to issues raised by Stratusphere UX.

I think what this customer story demonstrates is that, working in conjunction with Citrix and ourselves, the customer got the required results in a dramatic timeframe, that ensured not only business continuity but also user satisfaction by providing the desired user experience.

The feature enhancements we’ve made to Stratusphere UX (version 6.1.5) during the pandemic, in response to customer feedback, provides further visibility into user experience. This visibility is based on providing information in three key areas – 1. Are your users connected; 2. Are they operational and; 3. Are they productive? The latest version provides key “First Mile” metrics, such as an expanded set of Wi-Fi metrics for troubleshooting a user’s home connection. These metrics include access point signal strength, access point distance and connection speed, as well as support for mesh networks. The pandemic forced organizations to rapidly launch work from home options and these metrics are now highlighted in the Advanced Inspectors, Dashboards and SpotChecks within Stratusphere UX to identify these first mile performance issues more easily. Organizations are now assured that the technologies their workers rely upon are responsive and support work from home seamlessly. In turn this reduces IT support overheads and increases user productivity.

We’ve also not been remiss in adding new features to ProfileUnity and FlexApp too! The latest version – 6.8.3 – includes these enhancements:
• Seamless FlexApp compatibility with FSLogix
• Enhanced Windows 10 Multi-session OS support (WVD)
• FlexApp speed improvements on launch from Cloud
• New Microsoft App-V and MSIX “Convert-to-FlexApp” features
• Security hardening (client)
• VHDX support for FlexApp and ProfileDisk
• Bug fixes, FlexApp, File Extensions, etc.
• Updated FlexApp filter driver for speed and compatibility
• Hourly billing for AWS
• FlexApp and base image runtime installer tool for C++ runtimes and .NET frameworks

If you’d like more information about how Liquidware can burst scale your Citrix environment, please just reach out to us at sales@liquidware.com.