And so to the ninth Citrix UK User Group event. Ninth! Double figures next one so let’s try and make it special eh? But still..focus. Lessons were learned from previous London events, so no more underground windowless rooms with no signal. This time, underground rooms with a window and with a wi-fi signal. Your feedback is important and helps shape future events.

Thanks to The Thistle hotel for providing a great venue. Thanks to all the presenters, and most of all thanks to the attendees for providing interesting and useful content and discussing challenges and ideas that based on experience.

What was mentioned in the feedback forms, and on twitter was the impressive line up of speakers. Despite the handy voucher code for attendees to allow a discount for Synergy in the US getting out of Europe to intereact with the Citrix community is expensive ..so we helped bring them to you. We had speakers from America, France and the Netherlands come and present. For you means that you can learn and listen; by you means that you can in turn, query and suggest and present back.

Thanks to our sponsors AppSense, Atlantis Computing, Norskale and Nutanix for helping to make this a free to attend event.

 

We covered…

Citrix News Update

We had a brief chat around the release of Citrix XenApp 7.5 because we had a full session on it. Citrix Share Price up. Some people left the company. Most importantly we had a chat about you presenting in future events and we quoted the #FeedForward  initiative by the guys at VMUG which is an excellent idea and should be encouraged across communities. VMWare and Citrix may have their corporate battles – but we, as users,  quite often have to deal with both: a synergy between both communities can only be a good thing.

XenApp 7.5 What’s new. How to get there?

Neil Spellings, from the UK Citrix User Group had utilized his CTP status to the full and done a lot of background demo work to allow the group to see, quite possibly, the first live demo of XenApp 7.5 in the flesh. An interesting session – all the more useful for the wifi keeping it together. Especially interesting for the Amazon integration, but as a whole very much a first chance to see. Always ballsy to do a live demo. I think we can safely upgrade that to “very ballsy” given it was on the same day as it was released.For the deck – click here

 

Without Sponsors, there is no free event. We really appreciate their support of the community.Rob Tribe took us through Nutanix are, how they fit into the next generation convergence and how Nutanix deliver on software defined storage.For the deck – click here

The Changing face of the Desktop: Turning Challenges into Benefits with Virtualisation.

Chris Marks, from the Citrix UK User Group, led us on an informative view of Microsoft licensing in a remote working/VDI environment. Undoubtedly an evocative topic, Chris ably dealt with it by utilizing the obvious zombie death apocalypse analogy.For the deck – click here

 

XenMobile – what is it and how to set up a PoC

Iain Brighton,  from the Citrix UK User Group led us on an informative view of attempting to start (as a user) a XenMobile PoC.  What was key to Iain’s delivery was .. he failed. Not all presentations need to be about success. His brief was to set up a PoC – and he wasn’t able to do that. Not from personal failing, but from having proper interaction and support from Citrix just not being delivered on time. Odd, given that mobility is key.  Still, he not only utilized his wait time generating an enviable Visio stencil set, he delivered a presentation giving focus on where you need to be in order to understand/PoC  XenMobile.For the deck – click here

 

Web interface to Storefront- the how and the why

Esther Barthel  from Pepperbyte led us on an insightful view of the progression from Web Interface to Storefront to help  understand if Storefront was ready for the big league. About 25% of the audience had looked at/deployed Storefront to date – so there was room for enlightenment.  Esther’s session exposed a number of new keyword features, possibilities in customization and updated feature comparison set that many found useful.For the deck – click here

 

Notes from the field from – Atlantis Computing

Without Sponsors, there is no free event. We really appreciate their support of the community.Andrew Wood eschewed the standard vendor deck, and walked through three key findings from his work as an SE for Atlantis that would help optimise virtual desktop performanceFor the deck – click here

 

 

Best Practices in SBC / VDI environments (Part Three): Optimize login & response times! 

Without Sponsors, there is no free event. We really appreciate their support of the community.Pierre Marmignon Norskale CEO and founder talked through common issues that impact logon and application performance in a virtual desktop environment. From Active Directory Group Policy optimization and design considerations through to application optimization, Pierre discussed what drove his desire to set up Norskale to help solve those issues. 100% pure gold according to one twitter poster.For the deck – click here

 

Ensuring your apps work and perform after the migration 

Kevin Goodman has a welath of experience in the  desktop virtualization space. He was the CEO at RTO Software which led to a stint at VMware and now he’s started a new venture – FSLogix. Kevin talked through application deployment issues and how the industry has coped and will need to cope with application demands and new storage technologies and gave a brief glimpse at where FSLogix is designed to help in the future.Will be interesting to have Kevin back.

 

Notes from the field from – Atlantis Computing

As has already been said, without Sponsors, there is no free event. We really appreciate their support of the community and AppSense have been great sponsors through all our events.Gary talked through how AppSense can add value to a XenDesktop 7 project by walking through the latest Appsense Performance Manager and Application Manager features.For the deck – click here

 

Tools that Citrix marketing forgot

Dave Gaunt  lead SE at Citrix is thankfully no stranger to the UK Citrix user group – he’s often available to provide excellent insight and feedback. In this session, Dave talked through some of the interesting side projects that are currently being tinkered with in the Citrix Lab Shed – tools like convoi for conf calls via voip, talkboard for whiteboarding and hutt – clientless video conferencing.All clever stuff keep an eye on themFor the deck – click here

 

Roundtable: 

The roundtable is always a popular session, and this was no exception – key discussion points included.

• AppDNA – have Citrix just killed it? – while AppDNA is now part of platinum there was concern that this was now the only method of purchase. Much discussion on how many Platinum licenses were required for a large scale project with a number considering that AppDNA was frankly more of a partner tool than a benefit to customers directly. A key application analysis function that needed to be considered was actually resource usage rather than just simply compatibility.
• Should Citrix have a DaaS Service was a question that had a resounding “no” with many being hesitant for moving directly to use DaaS directly. Fundamentally, the concern for moving to a DaaS environment is access to applications and in-house/custom applications. As such, Citrix’s model for providing the tools to deliver a virtual desktop service made more sense than buying a generic product. While the new cloud enabling features were interesting – there were concerns about how user data was delivered into those environments and how automation would be used to stand up/tear down services.
• Mobility – whats your approach? brought about a lively discussion. My notes simply say ITS A FAD in big letters: there was definitely more to it than that – but the topics and concerns revolved around there being too much scope for change and the pace of change being so quick that having a “mobile strategy” was difficult. While there is a growing awareness that data and applications need to be delivered to a range of devices – the presentation of that data needs to be tailored. Simply delivering a desktop with desktop apps is not enough: discussion around the use of Citrix to isolate data on devices and SDKs to reskin/represent information for a range of use cases, not just a techno junkie Chief Exec.

For a view of the twitter feed of the event you can follow the Story here.

Again, thanks to AppSense, Atlantis Computing, Norskale and Nutanix for sponsoring the event, drinks and platters. Finally, congratulations to Nick Daniels – not only for finally retiring the Winframe environment but for winning a signed copy of Esther’s book.

The next user group meeting will be likely around September with another event in November. Keep an eye/ear out for more details.

It’s a goal of the user group to share ideas and information. If you see a pertinent presentation, if you plug into a wonderful webinar, if you’ve done something you simply want to share then the UK Citrix User Group exists to help you distribute that resource by having a place to discuss it with your peers.

Join us on Twitter where our lists now includes links to all those who have presented.

Share with us at up and coming events, or on our LinkedIn group

Cheers,

UK Citrix User Group Steering Group.