Today’s sessions that I attended were pretty good. I was good seeing some of the new features that will be in the next release. The health monitoring looks to be a step in the right direction, but for those of us already running something like HP OpenView, I am not sure if this is a plus or not. I’d like to see Citrix rip out RM and replace it with an EdgeSight “lite.” What I really need is a decent reporting package that shows me the health of all of my Citrix servers in one picture. With RM today i have to go server by server to get a picture of individual components. Not the easiest thing to use when trying to study capacity or look for issues. It looks like we can expect some performance improvements with the client, but that may be the part that causes me the most heartburn.

I noticed at last year’s iForum in Las Vegas that Citrix seemed to be moving more of the processing down to the client to get better performance. Great for you if you have a PC, but what about those of us running thousands of thin clients? Maybe the XPe or Linux based thin clients will perform better, but we run WinCE based thin clients. I’m guessing these won’t have a prayer of taking advantage of all the new client-based bells and whistles. With XPe, if I stll have to manage it like a regular desktop (patching and anti virus) why wouldn’t I just put a PC on someone’s desk and lock it down tight with group policies? Might be the best way to go, but I’ll wait until I see a shipping product before I panic over our thin clients. The nice thing is the Neoware thin clients that we use at work can run WinCE, Linux, or XPe, so we may get lucky.