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Possibly my last Citrix iForum for a while

I believe this is my fourth Citrix iForum this year.  As always, Citrix puts on a first class show, and I always enjoy Mark Templeton’s keynote, but this year the message felt like it has for the last few years – the same.  It’s really all about the access.  Presentation Server had very few new tricks, although WANScaler looks promising.

Citrix seems to be pushing their desktop strategy, but based on the presentations the first revision will not do much more for me than publishing the Remote Desktop Client to allow someone to get to their desktop.  Citrix does make the management of the process easier by pooling those desktop resources, but my problem with it is that it doesn’t go quite as far as I was hoping.

I was hoping for a solution that would allow my users to access an external Web Interface/Citrix Secure Gateway server, enter their credentials, and then select the desktop they want to connect to; no ICA to RDP, just WI to an RDP desktop.  ICA is still there, which still feels like what we have already been doing for a couple years; publishing out the RDC.  I love ICA, but since ICA is not on the desktops and RDP is, ICA needs to step out of the way and allow WI/CSG to tunnel the RDP session back to my users via https.  I bet we get this in a later revision.  I believe I heard that Microsoft will come out with a web accessible gateway with Longhorn, so I may get my wish, only through a different vendor than expected.

Don’t get me wrong, Citrix is still a great product and the best game in town, but there are only so many ways you can repackage the same message.  It’s all about giving people access to their applications from anywhere in the world.  Nobody does that better than Citrix.

Maybe I’m just a little disappointed that the rumors flying around about version 4.5 being released this week look like they are not going to come true.  On the positive side it is nice to see that everyone is not complaining about printing issues much anymore.  Looks like Citrix finally has a decent solution in that arena with their Universal Printer Driver.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 12:13 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Thanks for the comment Tal. Presentation server just played a much lesser role this year. Citrix now has a lot of different products to talk about so the Presentation Server pieces were few and far between. The one session I went to on Presentation Server futures was in a large room and was still standing room only. That tells me I am not alone in my opinion here.

    The rest of the stuff, while impressive, has an uphill battle trying to get in our door because it would have to de-throne Cisco and F5, which will not be easy to do in our shop.

    We actually won a pair of the WANScalers and hope to get the network team to evaluate them based on the fact that we have a free pair. We'll see how that goes.

    Thanks again for replying. I'll wait and see what the Agenda is for the next iForum before I decide what to do.
  • Hey,

    I'm Tal Klein, one of the guys at Citrix's Application Networking Group behind the WANScaler launch. I think there are actually lots of good reasons to keep coming to iForum. There's some amazing stuff coming in the near future which I think will resonate well with what you've been asking for.

    -Tal
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