It’s time for the March edition of “What’s new in Citrix Workspace” – brought to you by the Citrix Product Marketing Team. On the XenMobile front, be sure to check out this post on UEM support for Google Chrome Enterprise.
Late March (the 20th to be exact) marks the official start of spring for us in the Northern Hemisphere. Spring is a time when snow and cooler temperatures give way to the growth of trees and blossoming of flowers. Of course for most of us on the team based in sunny South Florida, it means that already sunny days will simply be getting hotter with more chances for afternoon showers. As well as the ongoing migration of snowbirds/northerners back home to cooler climates.
So, without further ado, on to the updates…
Announcing Citrix Workspace Premium Service
A Citrix Workspace is a complete and integrated digital workspace that securely unifies all apps, cloud services, data, network and identity services managed from a single, cloud-hosted control plane. This month (March), Citrix announced the availability of Citrix Workspace Premium starting at less than $35 dollars per user per month based on a 3-year contract. This new Citrix Cloud Services offering builds upon our proven app and desktop virtualization, networking, unified endpoint management and content collaboration capabilities to give every user unified access to all of their digital workspace resources from any device. More info on Citrix Workspace Premium is available on our Citrix Cloud services subscriptions page.
Introducing XenApp Service for Citrix Cloud
On March 6th, Citrix introduced XenApp Service for Citrix Cloud to help meet customers’ hybrid cloud needs. XenApp Service secures the delivery of Windows, Linux, Web and SaaS applications to any device from anywhere, while enabling you to manage your on-premises infrastructure and your cloud-based infrastructure from one simple cloud console. XenApp Service allows you to choose the workload deployment option that best aligns with your enterprise cloud strategy and migrate to the cloud when you are ready. Powered by Citrix Cloud, XenApp Service offers the quickest way to deploy a fully featured app virtualization solution. For more information, you can read about XenApp Service here.
New Secure Browser Standard Service
With the ever increasing amount of web and SaaS applications in the enterprise, the browser has become a crucial part of the IT landscape. The modern user does not only use the browser to run apps, but also uses the browser as the default way to access files and collaboration tools needed for daily work. At the same time, the browser and especially the browser plug-ins, have become one of the leading attack vehicles used in data theft, phishing and ransomware attacks. To counter this threat, many organizations have heavily restricted or completely banned the general surfing of the internet from within the corporate network – often leading to loud protests from users.
The new Secure Browser Standard Service available on Citrix Cloud enables IT admins to allow users to surf the web without sacrificing security. It also allows a very easy way for existing XenApp and XenDesktop customers that have published browsers to offload non-strategic internet browsing to an isolated browser running in the cloud, increasing security while simultaneously reducing the load on their servers. Simply by installing two Citrix Cloud Controllers and pointing their existing StoreFront to those, customers can integrate the remote secure browser into their existing solutions. Read more about the new Secure Browser Service here.
XenApp Essentials Adds Hosted Shared Desktops
Recently, at no additional cost, XenApp Essentials added a hosted shared desktops feature for customers in addition to its current published applications. With hosted shared desktops, XenApp Essentials subscribers can easily deploy a Windows 2012 R2 Shared Desktop to their users, providing a Windows desktop experience to any device from anywhere. It’s just another choice designed to accommodate various scenarios to get work done. While this feature is not a new one for long-time experienced XenApp users, it does show the commitment to continue to add value and expand the use case for XenApp Essentials Service.
License Usage in Citrix Cloud
If you clicked recently on the top left hamburger menu in the Citrix Cloud console, you may have noticed an additional new item, which many of our customers have been requesting. New License Usage reporting capabilities allow Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service customers to gain insights on how many user licenses have been allocated against what have been purchased, associated trends, and details on individual user – license events. Get the full story here.
New Session Sharing capabilities between published desktop and app with VPrefer
We’re excited to announce a new feature that further enhances the end-user experience. It allows launching local apps instead of remote apps from within a desktop session. Configured by admins for end users, this means that a published app available locally in the published desktop will launch within the same session as the preference. It avoids an additional logon cycle allowing the application to launch faster. Not only does this improve the user experience, it also saves resources in your environment as sessions are now consolidated. To learn more about it and how to enable it, check out our recent blog post.
ShareFile Custom Workflows
From their mobile devices, users now can access forms built in a web application. Thanks to ShareFile Custom Workflows, they can select forms, enter the data into the forms and watch as another step in the process is kicked off. View additional details about ShareFile Workflows in this blog post.
Join us at the NVIDIA GTC Conference!
An innovative show of all things related to graphics and GPUs — that’s NVIDIA GTC. Citrix will be there with several exciting sessions including a cloud-powered workspace on Azure for designers and engineers as well as updates on the latest joint innovations for virtualized HDX 3D Pro graphics and a customer panel discussion. Plus much more! It all takes place in San Jose, California from March 26-29. For additional information and to register for the event, visit the NVIDIA GTC event site.
That’s a wrap for this month’s installment. We hope you find our series informative. Be sure to subscribe to our blog account, so you don’t miss any updates. We also welcome your feedback, questions and suggestions via the comments below.
Until next time, enjoy the spring season (or fall if you’re in the Southern hemisphere).
Allen Furmanski
@TekGuyAllen
