As a product manager, I talk to customers regularly from every industry. During the last few months, most of these conversations have had a common theme: the Citrix Workspace app Long Term Service Release (LTSR) 1912 for Windows.
I’m often asked, “What does the Citrix Workspace app LTSR have to offer that Citrix Receiver LTSR did not?”
My short answer? A lot! So much, in fact, it’s often hard to figure out where to start.
When developing this Workspace app LTSR, we tried to focus on offering IT admins a robust but predictable version, with flexible controls and an improved end-user experience. There is so much to talk about — the improvements, the new capabilities, and, of course, the sheer joy of telling customers that we solved your problem.
So here it is: My short (but detailed) answer to this frequently asked question. These are the top 10 reasons to upgrade from Citrix Receiver 4.9 LTSR to Citrix Workspace app 1912 LTSR:
- Workspace App Install/Update Improvements — Over the last few months, we’ve enhanced the installations and updates, and the improvements will deliver a seamless admin experience. I’d like to call out a few notable improvements:
- With the improved installer, you will not need the clean-up utility. The new installer switch called /forceinstall intelligently detects and performs a clean-up if required. Check out our previous blog for more details.
- In earlier versions, if an admin tried to install the Citrix Workspace app in a system that had a user-installed instance of the app, the admin installation was blocked. With this LTSR, administrators can override the user-installed instance of the Citrix Workspace app.
- Previously, users couldn’t update the Citrix Workspace app if there was an admin-installed instance of the app. With this LTSR, admins can allow users to update the Citrix Workspace app themselves on an admin-installed instance of the app.
- App Protection Capabilities — Every customer I’ve spoken to about this feature wants it. That’s not surprising. After all, enterprises definitely want to protect application data from keyloggers and screen scrapers while still embracing BYOD and extending apps to contractors and gig economy workers. With App Protection, the Citrix Workspace app provides anti-keylogging and anti-screen-capturing capabilities, helping to protect sensitive data from misuse or theft.
- Graphics Enhancements — Your end users deserve a high resolution, seamless, and intuitive experience. The DPI matching feature enables desktop sessions to match the DPI of the endpoint when using Citrix Workspace app for Windows. Another super useful feature — virtual display layout — lets you define a virtual monitor layout that applies to the remote desktop and to virtually split a single client monitor into up to eight monitors on the remote desktop.
- Optimization for Microsoft Teams — You want to move off the old Skype RTOP and deliver Microsoft Teams on Citrix? We hear you! You can now deliver a native Microsoft Teams experience for Citrix users. We have a robust Microsoft Teams feature set built into the Workspace app LTSR that will remain the same throughout the lifecycle of the LTSR client with quality and bug fixes. We recommend that organizations that want continuous access to the latest features leverage the Current Releases of the Workspace app. Head here for more insight into this capability.
- Single Sign-On Support with Citrix Gateway — Finally! Yes, you can now configure single sign-on with Citrix Gateway.
- Performance Improvements – I am confident you expected these improvements to appear on this list. The default number of ICA output buffers that are used to send and receive data has been raised from 44 (64 Kilobytes) to 100 (~145 Kilobytes). This change delivers improved throughput performance even on high latency connections. In addition, HDX adaptive throughput intelligently fine tunes the peak throughput of the ICA session by adjusting output buffers. Providing better interactivity, faster file transfers, smoother video playback, higher framerate, and resolution results in an enhanced user experience.
- Support for Copy and Paste Between Sessions and Clients — This might seem like a tiny feature, but, trust me, your users are going to love this. Users can now copy and paste files, directories, or groups of files or directories between a session and a local client.
- Quality and Security Fixes — I cannot stress enough on how hard our teams have worked to fix the quality issues in the product. Since the last few CRs, I have heard from several customers that they see a visible improvement in the quality of the app. Of course, all these improvements are carried over to LTSR.
- Improvements to Client Drive Mapping — Client drive mapping now supports the transfer of data between the host and the client as a stream. This enhancement ensures that the file transfer adapts to the changing network throughput conditions. It also uses any available extra bandwidth to scale up the data transfer rate. Client drive mapping now supports transfers of files larger than 4 Gigabytes.
- Support for PDF Printing — And finally, Citrix Workspace app for Windows supports PDF printing in a session. The Citrix PDF Universal Printer driver allows you to print documents that are launched using hosted applications and desktops running on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
So this might not be a short, yes/no answer to your Citrix Receiver LTSR vs. Citrix Workspace app LTSR question. But, as you can see, we’ve delivered a plethora of enhancements since the last release. For customers leveraging specific cloud services like Citrix Workspace with intelligent capabilities and browser content redirection, we recommend you stay on the Citrix Workspace app Current Release track. Check out our Citrix Workspace app LTSR announcement blog for more information.
We are constantly working to bring a seamless experience to end users and cannot wait to see or LTSR community update to the Citrix Workspace app for Windows LTSR 1912. Be sure to download and start testing today!
