­

Blog

  • A content platform for the
    End User Computing community

Liquidware adds cloud storage with Profile Unity

|Posted In: Blog , End User Computing , Liquidware Labs | April 24, 2018 | 0

Today Liquidware kicked off the “Pre Citrix Synergy” announcements in style with their latest release of ProfileUnity v6.7.6 including an industry first, Cloud User Profile technology.

With their latest release, their profile solution now has the ability to store user profile settings and details directly to Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure platforms. This will allow organisations to  store and retrieve users data from local or cloud based user workspaces directly from their cloud profile of choice, without relying on SMB / CIFS syncronisation between local and remote.

With this feature, they’re making DaaS / hosted applications a first class citizen for user profiles, rather than an afterthought by many vendors in the DaaS space today.

Further, Liquidware have also added the ability to sync data out to the cloud storage platform of choice of users, too. Allowing specific folders to be automagically be sync’d to a number of providers such as Dropbox, Amazon WorkDocs and Google drive to name a few.

A big release from Liquidware, and we’re looking forward to seeing 6.7.6 in action soon!

you can read more here and here.

 

FSLogix Project Flux Makes Office 365 and Other Applications A Reality in Non-Persistent Virtual Desktops Part 1

|Posted In: Blog , Citrix , End User Computing , FSLogix , Horizon , Remote Desktop Services , VDI | July 13, 2016 | 0

Recently at Citrix Synergy, FSLogix announced a new feature code named Project Flux.  Project Flux is a much needed and awaited feature in the non-persistent virtual desktop world.  As applications move to cloud based infrastructures like Office 365 and the distance between client and server infrastructure grows, applications can suffer from poor performance issues.  Things have been done to try and band aid this issue by redirecting folders to local file shares such as Application Data or just redirecting the caching portion of the application in applications such as Outlook or Lotus Notes.  The problem with redirecting Application Data or just the caching portion of the application is we aren’t really solving the problem.  The application can and will suffer from poor performance.  I say can and will because at smaller scale things may seem ok, but what happens when you try to scale?  The problem comes back or things get worse when another piece of infrastructure, like a file server, becomes overloaded during peak usage times of the day.  So how does FSLogix solve this problem?  With Project Flux!

Read More

A chat with Helge Klein, his journey thus far and his future with Vast Limits

|Posted In: Blog , End User Computing , Podcasts , Remote Desktop Services , VDI | November 13, 2015 | 0

Welcome back! We’ve got a great podcast in store with a hero of mine for many years. On this episode we had the pleasure to speak with Helge Klein, on his background in IT, his products thus far and his latest venture with UberAgent and Vast Limits.

On this podcast we spoke about:

  • Helge’s background and his journey from Atari owner, to photography and finally to software company owner.
  • A little wonder about Novell.
  • The history of SetACL.
  • The history of Citrix Profile Manager.
  • Why Helge decided to go independent and his advice.
  • What did Helge learn from SetACL studio.
  • Why write a monitoring product.
  • Vast Limits, UberAgent and Splunk.
  • Brandon Shell joining the team.
  • Upcoming features in UberAgent.
  • How Helge broke through and his advice to up and coming professionals.
  • What Technology Excites Helge.

A great podcast and well worth the listen. We’ll catch you again soon.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/231113870″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=true&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=false” width=”100%” height=”120″ iframe=”true” /]

 

 

 

Apple Watch & Amazon vouchers winners

|Posted In: Blog | November 2, 2015 | 0

The surveys have been counted (over 100!) and three lucky winners have been selected! with a big thank you to our above sponsors, the following are our winners!

Apple Watch Winner:

  • Ryan Revord

$100 Amazon gift vouchers: 

  • Patrick Wescott
  • Bart Jacobs
  • Garrett Chapman

Congrats to the winners, we’ll be running another competition early next year. Thank you to everyone for the feedback, it’s really valued.

Talk soon!

Jarian & Andrew.

VMworld 2015 Barcelona EUC highlights

|Posted In: Blog , End User Computing , VMware | October 20, 2015 | 0

vmworld_logo

With thanks to our awesome sponsor ControlUp, we had the pleasure of attending VMworld 2015 in barcelona this week. Now that the dust has settled and the coolaid has been drunk (never drink and blog) here I’ve summized a few points from the week.

VMworld is always such a huge machine to EUC people, almost daunting at times and that’s never clearer than when talking to other techies who have no clue about EUC in general, VMware really is a beast in that regard, but i’m only two paragraphs and I’ve already digressed. This VMworld has had a really good portion of EUC focus, all sessions on the topics from roadmap, futures and graphics were completely booked out and things are really moving forward. I was a little disappointed not to see more EUC vendors, but knowing that VMware have an entry level answer to UEM and (in a lot of cases) a better answer to application layering, maybe there’s a little “cutting off nose in spite of face…” from the hurt feels.

Read More

Thank you to our sponsors (Giveaway!)

|Posted In: Blog | October 20, 2015 | 0

Today is a great day at FrontLine Chatter, to celebrate the awesome folks at ControlUp, FSLogix and LiquidWare Labs choosing to support our podcast we’re giving back to the community with a little competition!

Our sponsors have sponsored us to validate what we’re doing here and keep it alive. Jarian and I are super grateful for this and we are really going to start gearing up FrontLine chatter in the coming months.

To ControlUp, FSLogix and LiquidWare Labs, thank you very much for your support!

So Without further ado… We’ve an Apple sport watch up for grabs & two $100 Amazon gift cards available too!

apple-watch-sport-blk-100413450-gallery

(If you live in a country where the Apple Watch is not available, or you’re a microsoft / Android person, worry not! a $350 amazon gift card is available instead!)

Entering the competition:

It’s really, really, simple!

That’s it!

The competition will close on Friday the 30th of october, 3 random entrants will be selected and the winners will be announced on the blog. Best of luck to our listeners. Thank you for listening, Thank you for your feedback and thank you for your support, you rock.

Tweet Example:

"Thank you <insert sponsor above> for sponsoring @frontlinechat #FrontLineChatter"

(Note: ensure to use the hashtag so we can track it)

Citrix Synergy keynote 2015 day 1, a wrap up.

|Posted In: Blog , Citrix , End User Computing | May 12, 2015 | 1

What a great keynote, we got absolutely DDOS’d by people on the live blog feed and couldn’t get the information out fast enough, so here’s a blow by blow of what we saw today.

Citrix is back in love with XenApp:

 

CEz9vI3UUAEerpe

A common theme throughout the keynote was Citrix frequently touching on XenApp and it’s necessity for customers. To paraphrase, Mark Templeton highlighted the importance of XenApp, “We love XenApp, because our customers love XenApp”. I think there was a subtle undercurrent here of acknowledging the XenApp turbulence with the XenDesktop integration and backing out.

XenApp 6.5 support has been extended for at least another year, extending support into 2017. Personally, I’m not sure about the validity of this move, it’s going to cause confusion. But for any customers currently on 6.5 with challenges to migration, rejoice.

A feature pack 3 for XenApp is expected, with support Receiver .Next, Storefront 3, better profile management and with improvements to the Lync optimisation pack.

Read More

XenMobile, the Device solution that could solve the App problem

|Posted In: Blog , End User Computing | May 8, 2015 | 0

I don’t think of myself as an evangelist or purist in any technology. I am known to some as Mr Agnostic and others as the egotist with a love for Citrix Technologies, I guess that depends on who is in the selling chair. But I do love tech, in all its forms and functions.

Normally I have some well formed ideas, I have been known to speak about them at length, but after listening to Andrew Morgan and Jarian Gibson on frontline chatter talk to Gunnar Berger from Citrix I finally heard from the CTO of Apps and Desktops a whisper of something that I’ve been pushing towards in my own job. Namely forget windows desktops and instead focus on the device apps.

My role in Another 9 is to help us to provide Desktops as a Service and Mobile Management as a Service with a mix of public/private and hybrid cloud deployments. But I’ve never felt happy to see this as Multitenant VDI and to focus on the Desktop delivery as key. When I set up Mobile Device Management (MDM) as a Service I couldn’t help but see something beautiful hidden in the architecture. My plan became simple, provide Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) as a Service and if the device needs windows apps, then give them XenApp as an add-on.

Theres a “pivot” here … 

somewhere

From my previous role as a Consultant I focused on the Workspace\Desktop and I am guilty of focusing on the Virtual desktop technology, leaving the user device to last. Sure we could make “Citrix” work on anything, a PC, Tablet, Phone, Thin Client and even on those artsy OSX devices. With XM10 integrated MDM and Apps I began to realise the importance of the focus on the device. This change in my approach as putting the device first and providing the device with the right application to its needs, started a shift in thinking that I have only now fully realised, and it’s pretty cool.

Read More

Synergy or Bust? How important is this years Synergy to current day Citrix.

|Posted In: Blog , End User Computing | May 5, 2015 | 7

Success-Failure-signpost1_royaltyfreeWith synergy approaching and my own excitement steadily building, I ended up in a lively debate with a number of twitter friends over the weekend with hopes for Citrix to emerge from their slump or sleepy slumber. This conversation was observed and commented on by many, with a good portion of snark and pessimism.

Pessimism?  Yeah, sure, Citrix has had a pretty poor year. Staffing cuts, stock drops, sales / profit warnings, some of the industries largest names jumping ship to their VMware and competitors really driving up efforts. Citrix are aware of their position and they’ve been fairly quiet. I’ve seen great humility this year in even ‘the smuggest’ of Citrites, only at the start of this year, for the first time in my ten year affair with Citrix products and features, did I hear a VP during a customer briefing mention their competitors during a keynote. As with nature, any sign of weakness is always preyed on by competitors.

Speaking of the valid competitors. VMware are being respectfully aggressive. Really, respectfully aggressive and not only are they taking a machete to the feature parity gap between Horizon and XenDesktop, they’re also adding serious value (App Volumes, Immidio, etc) in ways that Citrix couldn’t do today. They caught Citrix during a weak spot in their desktop virtualisation transformation, but more on that later.

Where did it all go wrong?

Read More