Welcome to our monthly “What’s New in Citrix Workspace” blog post. This series gives you — our customers, partners, analysts, and industry leaders — a taste of the latest innovations from Citrix Workspace: XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, XenServer, and ShareFile.

We’re now only a few days away from the official kickoff of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere — a time when folks start firing up their BBQ grills or packing their bags for a family vacation. While many are taking advantage of long weekends or some much-needed time off, we at Citrix are busy cranking out amazing new features and turning up the heat on the competition.

When we announced at Citrix Synergy 2018 that what you saw on stage would be available in 90 days, we weren’t kidding. Fresh off the heels of the recently publicized release of XenApp and XenDesktop 7.18, a number of feature releases across the Citrix Workspace prove to make June an exciting month. It’s packed with improvements not only to the end-user experience, but also to the admin experience.

Let’s dive into those releases:

Faster Deployments of Apps and Desktops in Microsoft Azure

Nearly a year ago, we announced a tech preview about the ability to provision VDAs to Azure Government with the XenApp and XenDesktop service. You may already be familiar with the Machine Creation Services (MCS) from on-prem or other cloud infrastructures. Now, we are officially ready to declare this production-ready. Not only is it ready for the XenApp and XenDesktop service, but also for the Current Release (CR) of XenApp and XenDesktop 7.18. It will also have full support for provisioning VDAs to Azure Government and Azure Germany. Read more about the functionality here.

And while we’re on the subject of Provisioning and Azure, please note that we recently added two great features to the XenApp and XenDesktop service: Provisioning Services (PVS) management by Citrix Cloud and Azure Quick Deploy.

Azure Quick Deploy allows you to quickly stand up a basic Resource Location in Azure without having to manually complete all the tasks it takes to set up and connect a Resource Location and then configure it in Studio. Using Azure Quick Deploy you will get a server VM and the Citrix Cloud connectors set up and installed. Applications will be published to your users without remoting in to a VM and touching Studio. This is the perfect tool for basic PoCs, as well as for administrators who want to get started quickly without having to learn how to navigate in the cloud-based XenApp and XenDesktop Full Configuration management tool. Get additional information such as pre-requisites and limitations to Azure Quick Deploy.

Provisioning Services management for Citrix Cloud allows you to manage your on-prem PVS delivered VDAs from the XenApp and XenDesktop service management console. Basically, it gives you the same functionality that you get with the on-premise product. Read more about the feature in the PVS product documentation.

A Sleek, Re-designed Secure Mail

Secure Mail, our enterprise-grade mail client, boasts an improved, more native experience for users. Earlier this month we released the latest version of Secure Mail: we introduced tabbed navigation, providing users a better way to navigate. Features such as Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Attachments are now available as buttons in the footer tab bar displacing the grabber icon. Functions like top navigation and floating action buttons — also new to Secure Mail — help us improve the experience for a business power user. They provide intuitive single click actions to simplify daily tasks on a mail client, a key focus of Secure Mail. June will be an exciting month for Secure Mail aficionados, and we’re just getting started. Get a glimpse of what else we have in store for Secure Mail: What’s New with Secure Mail.

 

Upcoming ShareFile IRM (Information Rights Management) Upgrades Make Protection Painless

ShareFile strives to deliver purposeful value-based enhancements perfectly in line with the needs of our customers. Securing data is crucial and IRM helps simplify access to protected sensitive data without the need for separate software or additional login step. Based on customer feedback, we’ve made some updates to our IRM experience that will improve the way you share sensitive documents.

Upgrades to our IRM experience include:

  • No additional viewer for recipients to install
  • Support for cloud zones worldwide
  • Support for Citrix XenMobile and Citrix XenDesktop

Now, when you email through ShareFile, you’ll see a new and improved list of menu options.

Current IRM capabilities will be automatically upgraded on July 31, 2018. Get more details about the new functionality.

So there you have it! Another month loaded with feature enhancements to the Citrix Workspace and more details about how we’re transforming the Future of Work. We shared a lot of updates at Citrix Synergy this year, so be sure to follow the Citrix Blog to follow along as those get released in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading!

Nitin Sharma
@nitinsharma_1