As you may already know, Citrix has an internal program for gathering product ideas from employees. In a previous post, I asked for customers to submit ideas so that I could forward these ideas into the product ideas database. The good news is that two of you (Alexander and Simon Bramfitt) submitted ideas that are now officially being reviewed.
I have not yet heard back any news but that is to be expected since I only submitted them in the last couple of weeks.
The reason for submitting this post is fairly simple. I want to gather some interest in helping Citrix define what products customers want the most. It can range from fairly simple improvements all the way up to totally new product lines. Citrix is much more receptive to this kind of feedback recently and it really is a great time to speak up.
Our original Citrix history is full of examples of listening to customers to make a greater impact on the market. It is often the last 5% of work that makes all the difference to everyone involved. Sometimes it just takes a few more bits of things added to truly make a highly successful product.
From my own perspective, I’m excited to have the chance again to reach out on the web to have a better understanding of what people are looking for. I must admit that keeping customers happy can be a very rewarding experience. It is even better when people are surprised with the level of service and their expectations have been surpassed.
The area I’m most interested in right now is related to the current PortICA project. Instead of just saying an open ended question, I’ll instead focus on more specific questions:
- Does having ICA be hosted in XP instead of Windows 2003 have value for you? If so, why?
- What kind of features from Presentation Server do you consider the most valuable on Windows XP desktops?
- Do you use RDP to Windows XP today and are you unhappy with any of its features (or lack thereof)?
- Are you interested in supporting more graphically intensive applications like OpenGL remotely on XP?
- Are you a believer in any current desktop initiative (DVI, VDI, DDI) and what makes it so compelling?
- What is your biggest issues with Presentation Server that might be solved with ICA on XP?
- Do you have any plans to push desktops using virtualization software like VMware?
You obviously don’t need to answer all of these questions. Pick the ones you like the most. Please leave feedback and I promise to share it with the PortICA group.
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Those are all very good questions. I am new to Citrix but I have a few ideas that I would like to see in PS. It would be nice to be able to create/import a citrix policy into the the MetaFrame PS Console, Searching for an application by name instead of user group, SECURITY logging (so when someone makes a change to the farm I want to know who did it)…that is pretty good for a start.
Just wanted to thank you guys for starting this blog!
These ideas were submitted as idea #2082 in the product ideas database.
It should be under review some time later this month. I’ll keep you posted in the results of this.
Does having ICA be hosted in XP instead of Windows 2003 have value for you? If so, why?
What kind of features from Presentation Server do you consider the most valuable on Windows XP desktops?
Do you use RDP to Windows XP today and are you unhappy with any of its features (or lack thereof)? – No but we are going to use Citrix RDB.
Are you interested in supporting more graphically intensive applications like OpenGL remotely on XP? Not a huge issue for us. The key for us would be that if a user/lab has a workstation with a local app installed that cannot be placed on a terminal server, we want the user to get access to that app.
Are you a believer in any current desktop initiative (DVI, VDI, DDI) and what makes it so compelling? YES! We are looking strongly at the VDI moving forward.
What is your biggest issues with Presentation Server that might be solved with ICA on XP? Apps and utilities that require local and/or per-machine installs require access from XP and not a central server. Even ccoler would be the ability to work with Mac apps running on the Mac cleint OS.
Do you have any plans to push desktops using virtualization software like VMware? Yes. A virtual lab, and hopefully secured remote access to users’ ofice computers.
Does having ICA be hosted in XP instead of Windows 2003 have value for you? If so, why?
because the ICA protocol is more efficient than RDP.
What kind of features from Presentation Server do you consider the most valuable on Windows XP desktops?
The integration in Published Applications, one place to manage the publications
Are you interested in supporting more graphically intensive applications like OpenGL remotely on XP?
Not OpenGL but GIS applications with orthophotos.
Are you a believer in any current desktop initiative (DVI, VDI, DDI) and what makes it so compelling?
Because we have one software to publish the desktops (Citrix) and CPS, VMWare ESX and physical hardware in the background to provide the desktops.
Do you have any plans to push desktops using virtualization software like VMware?
Yes, already realized with Desktop Broker.
And now other questions:
I am very interested in PortICA for Linux or a protocol adapter for NX server. No plans?
Policies for mirroring can be applied to servers and users but not to the combination of user and application.
We have a lot of applications and several help desks. One group of servers provides 30 applications.
The help desks should only see the users when they use applications which are in the responsibility of this help desk.
I wrote an own mirroring tool which shows only these sessions to the help desk where the help desk is responsible for.
But I would prefer to get this functionality in Citrix.
Printing is always the biggest problem.
We use only ICA autocreated printers.
I would really appreciate a console
– which is automatically filled up
– with all connected printers on all sessions on all servers with informations about client printer driver and server printer driver
– with the possibility to show all not connected printers (no server printer driver, no mapping defined, in exclusion list,…)
– logging of the information
If I had some spare time I would realize it. The information is available per WMI, the eventlog entries 1106 and 1107, in printcfg.exe.
I love the idea, of course…But really the question is how to make streaming media and graphic intensive things work (like new Vista Aero, SecondLife, others) combined with Audio..Need great solutions for that for VDI to truly work
Regarding srpratt’s comments:
One of these wishes is already granted, and another will be granted in the Project Ohio release of CPS.
Using today’s Access Suite Console, you can use Quick Search in the middle pane, type in the name of the application (or server or any other node in the tree) and the ASC will list all matching items. Double-click an item in the search results, and the ASC will select the corresponding tree node for you, expanding folders as necessary. You can even use this to search across all of the discovered farms in the console.
Project Ohio will introduce Administrator Audit Logging. This logs configuration changes to a database, including who did it and when. If you like, you can configure the farm to reject the changes unless they can be logged. You can also restrict access to the database so that others can’t tamper with it. It’s included with all three editions.
Good idea about the import/export of user policies. I’m writing the doc for porting that feature from the CMC to the ASC. I’ll include import/export as a possible new feature in it.