A month back, we introduced the new, modern user interface for Citrix cloud users in public tech preview. This was accompanied with a new feature, called Activity Manager. Today, we are incredibly excited to announce that the Activity Manager is now available for anyone leveraging the new sleek and modern Citrix UI! If you have not already tried out Activity Manager, I urge you to do so. The feature is multi-functional at its core. While it empowers your end users, it also eases the life of your help desk and administrators.

Let’s look at how it empowers end users

Citrix ‘Activity Manager’ on the Citrix app provides end users with the visibility and capability to manage all the apps and desktops they have opened and running on VMs, accessed across any devices on a single pane of window. At any point in time, users get a consolidated view of all sessions running. There are multiple use cases which can come in to play here:

  1. If a user has multiple apps and desktop sessions running on their physical machine in the office, they may leave the office in a hurry but still want to log out from the session. The user can log in to their mobile, or any other device, from home to access and take actions on all disconnected or non-disconnected sessions from Activity Manager within the Citrix app.
  2. If a user comes to a situation where the app and the whole session is unresponsive, the user is unable to move forward with their work. The only resolution is to reach out to the IT admin. Well, not anymore with Activity Manager access. The user can log in from another device or their mobile to take the appropriate action depending on whether it’s a persistent or non-persistent session. The user can directly reset or shutdown or power off the session.

Reducing support costs and making IT’s life easier

Users accessing both persistent and non-persistent sessions will now have direct access to take certain actions on their sessions. They no longer need to raise a support ticket to reset, hibernate, force quit, and more. As IT admins, you can enable this feature for your users to empower them and also reduce the support tickets related to resets, power off, etc., where the users cannot proceed further without IT intervention today.

Some of your organization may have support outsourced or you may be managing it in house. In either scenario, you will have a ‘support ticket per user per day’ cost associated that can be significantly reduced, while ensuring all of your end users are productive.

Supported end user actions include:

  • Log Out: Logs out from the session; the OS will be still running. This still conserves energy vis a vis a disconnected session.
  • Shut down: This is a graceful shutdown option where the OS and session is shutdown. This conserves energy and is the best option to end the week.
  • Restart: This option shuts down the machine and boots it up again. It’s often used when the machine is non-responsive.
  • Force Quit or Power Off: This option is like pulling the plug and is often used in scenarios where the session is non-responsive. However, it’s mostly available in persistent VM scenarios.
  • Hibernate (coming soon): When the user hibernates, the OS and machine are shutdown. While the running apps are closed, the status is saved.  When the user resumes the session, the apps are  launched making it the most energy efficient and end user efficient option available.

In addition to the above use cases and benefits, Activity Manager is a powerful tool that IT teams can leverage to drive sustainability and energy savings initiatives in your organization by enabling your users to be more responsible and drive discipline towards how their sessions are managed. For a closer look at how Activity Manager can help with your sustainability initiatives, read my latest blog. 

Note that Activity Manager is a feature that as admins you can choose to enable for specific user groups and disable for others using a toggle, if required. This can be done on Citrix Cloud console -> Workspace configuration customize features.

Try it today

The time is now to start leveraging the new Citrix user interface and give your users access to Activity Manager. To learn more about configuring the new UI and Activity Manager, please visit our product documentation. 

Disclaimer: The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and are subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.