So, who do I think is right? That is easy - they both are!

First I want to say thank you to both of these guys for getting a discussion going. If I can paraphrase Brandon's side of the argument it would be "Why do I need Workflow Studio? I have Windows PowerShell." This is a question I have gotten a lot and I want to take some time to address it here.

Workflow Studio is designed to run on top of PowerShell. PowerShell 1.0 is a pre-requisite and many of our activities are written in PowerShell. Like Brandon, I think that PowerShell is an excellent scripting language and I personally can't wait for the day when everything is in PowerShell and there is no more need for VBScript. I believe every Windows administrator should learn PowerShell and use it regularly. I am doing what I can to drive all Citrix products to expose an SDK in PowerShell.

So wait a minute then... if the Product Manager for Workflow Studio is saying to use PowerShell then what is Workflow Studio for?

There is no reason that you should have to decide between the two technologies. If you are a Citrix customer then you have Workflow Studio at no additional cost. Workflow Studio has a great SDK for consuming PowerShell libraries, so you can leverage your existing PowerShell libraries with Workflow Studio. Here are some other things you can do with Workflow Studio:

1. Workflows are stored centrally in a SQL database making sharing and re-use across your team much easier
2. Workflows are automatically versioned when stored in the database. If you update a workflow that has been deployed, a copy is automatically created so you can continue to reference and use the previous version.
3. Workflow Studio is integrated with a task scheduling interface to automate the execution of your workflows based on schedule.
4. Workflow Studio has a simple, graphical, drag and drop interface. Most likely not everyone on your team is a PowerShell expert. Workflow Studio provides a simple interface that lets those not familiar with PowerShell be productive with it as well.
5. Workflow Studio can easily integrate with things that aren't PowerShell (native libraries support VBScript, WMI, and running batch files. You can also use 'off-the-shelf' activity libraries for Workflow Foundation as well.)
6. Workflow Studio is designed to support persistence. For simple, quick jobs, someone who is familiar with PowerShell and the cmdlets necessary to complete a given task will be more effective using the PowerShell command line interface. If the task requires several levels of approvals over hours, days, or even months then Workflow Studio and its underlying persistence and tracking engine from Workflow Foundation is a better tool for the job.

And remember, everything in Workflow Studio is exposed via PowerShell, so you can build your own interfaces to your workflows in PowerShell.

I would love to get more feedback on this topic in the comments. Let me know if you agree or disagree. Ultimately these are both just tools and if they don't help you do your job then they are meaningless. Let us know how we can make both technologies work better for your organization.

Just in case you haven't seen the posts by Ed York and Michael Bogobowicz on Workflow Studio recently I wanted to call them out. In addition to providing some excellent activities and workflows for you, there are posts that explain the process of creating activities and workflows around XenApp, Provisioning Server, and SQL.

Michael wrote a workflow that automates the update of vDisks in Provisioning Server using the CLI tools:
http://community.citrix.com/display/wf/PVS+Automatic+vDisk+Update+Script

Ed has written up two excellent blog series on Workflow Studio:

• Workflow Studio SDK - This first series of posts detail Ed's experiences using the Workflow Studio SDK to build and debug custom activities and are an excellent place to start if you want to build your own activities:
  http://community.citrix.com/x/YIUJB
  Ed followed this series up with a post on building an activity to get a list of applications from XenApp using the MFCOM SDK and this activity and source code are available for download:
  http://community.citrix.com/x/KgE-B
  Ed also wrote a couple of activities that work with SQL Server:
  http://community.citrix.com/x/2IJiB

• Automating Workflow Studio - The second series of posts is on automating workflows. Ed has posts that explain how to use the PowerShell interface to start a workflow and pass parameters to it. He then goes on to explain how to build your own front-end for starting these workflows:
  http://community.citrix.com/x/ToNiB

As a reminder, all community posts on activity libraries and workflows will show up right in the Workflow Studio product under the Community tab so you don't even have to go out to the site to look. RSS feeds are also available on the Community site if you want to get notified in your favorite RSS reader.

During the Tech Preview of Workflow Studio, the most popular posts I had were around using Workflow Studio to create a green data center:

• Green Data Center - Support for Wake On LANhttp://community.citrix.com/x/RQUgAg

• Green Data Center - Getting the power back on
  http://community.citrix.com/x/AQUgAg

• Green Data Center - Shutting Down a Windows Server
  http://community.citrix.com/x/9IUNAg

• Green Data Center - Shutting Down a XenServer Host
  http://community.citrix.com/x/1IAVAg

I wanted to review these very popular posts and talk about how the most recent versions of Workflow Studio can be leveraged for these tasks.

Wake On LAN
Support for WakeOnLAN was included in the activity library pack made available in April with version 1.1. The WakeOnLAN activity is in the 'Networking' library and in the 'Networking' folder in the Designer once installed:

Shutting Down a Windows Server
In the Tech Preview post, I talked about two methods of shutting down a computer. One of those two methods - LaunchProcess - is available as part of the library pack that was released in April (under Windows), but also in that pack is a Shutdown activity that manages this for you. The Shutdown Windows activity is in the Networking library with Wake On LAN.

Shutting Down a XenServer host
In the Tech Preview post, I talked about several activities for interfacing with XenServer VMs and the XenServer host. These activities are all part of the library pack from April. These activities are in the 'Citrix XenServer' library and in the 'Citrix XenServer' folder in the Designer once installed:

The host activities Disable-Host and Shutdown-Host that were in the Tech Preview post are not available yet, but will be in the next update to this library.

If you are using Workflow Studio to manage power in your environment, drop me a line and let me know how it is going. If you aren't using it, let me know what we can do to make it easier for you.

Everyone who was at Snyergy last week wanted the link to how to do snapshots in XenServer. Here is the link to Shannon's PowerShell snap-in:

http://shannon.neutex.net/2008/11/06/hot-off-the-compiler-powershell-snapin-for-xenserver-snapshots/

I will also post a 'how-to' guide on how to convert this to an activity library.

I just posted an article on the components that are pre-requisites for Workflow Studio and how you can extend the ISO image we provided to include all components if you wish:

http://community.citrix.com/display/wf/Workflow+Studio+Pre-Requisites

I find it useful to have a CD image with everything on it that auto-runs, and thought that others might as well.

Now that we have released Workflow Studio 1.1, I wanted to point out that we also have articles with details about what is available in each activity library. There are 8 different libraries listed in the installer - click on the item below to view the activities available with each one:

• Citrix NetScaler
• Citrix XenServer
• Active Directory
• Group Policy
• Networking
• Windows
• WMI
• Workflow Math Functions

Note: The Group Policy activity library requires the Microsoft Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) to be installed before it can be used. You can get GPMC here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0a6d4c24-8cbd-4b35-9272-dd3cbfc81887&displaylang=en

Workflow Studio 1.1 is now available for download on MyCitrix. With this release we have also included the first set of activity libraries for Citrix products (and some Windows products and technologies as well). The installer will allow you to select which libraries you would like to install. You will find the following files on MyCitrix for download:

• WFStudio.iso - This is an .iso image file that contains all of the Workflow Studio installers and the redistributable components in a packaged CD image that supports auto-run. This is very useful for making your own CD/DVD or for installing Workflow Studio onto a virtual machine.

If you want to download the individual installers they are available separately as well:

• Setup.exe - There has been no change to the setup program. It still checks your system for the necessary pre-requisites and then automatically launches the correct MSI file for your platform
• WFStudio.msi - This is an update to the core components of Workflow Studio for 32-bit systems.
• WFStudio_x64.msi - This is an update to the core components of Workflow Studio for 64-bit systems.
• WFStudioActivities.msi - Activity Library package for 32-bit systems.
• WFStudioActivities_x64.msi - Activity Library package for 64-bit systems.

We will be releasing all supported activity libraries as updates to this installer package going forward. Currently, it contains the following:

• Citrix NetScaler
• Citrix XenServer
• Active Directory
• Group Policy
• Networking
• Windows
• WMI
• Workflow Math Functions

You will need to upgrade to version 1.1 of the core product before you can install the activity library package, and you will also need to manually run the activity library installer after upgrading to 1.1. In the future we will be updating the Setup.exe program to handle this installation automatically.

The 1.1 installer will detect 1.0 if installed and automatically upgrade it for you.

We had a question on the support forums about modifying the database used for Workflow Studio, which defaults to 'WFDB'. All the SQL scripts are provided for you in the Workflow Studio install, and we anticipated our customers wanting to have multiple databases on a single server or just changing the name from the default 'WFDB' name. In fact, if the SQL Admin wants more control they can customize as much as needed.

I wrote up an article to cover the process:
http://community.citrix.com/display/wf/Customizing+Your+Workflow+Studio+Database

If anyone tries this and runs into problems let me know

I have a lot of ideas for posts that I think will only be interesting to the software developer - the third audience of Workflow Studio. I started wondering just how many people reading this blog would consider themselves to fall into this category. Go back and read the post on the Three Audiences of Workflow Studio and then vote here to tell me which group you fall into. If you cross over more than one of them, pick the one you are most interested in reading about.

Which audience are you?	Choose
IT Operations
Server Administrator
Software Developer

In my last post I told you about the breakout session on Workflow Studio I will be doing and I hope to see you there:
http://community.citrix.com/x/FYG1Aw

If you are coming to Synergy I will also be hosting a Learning Lab on Workflow Studio and Citrix Receiver. The Learning Lab format gives us 3 hours to dive into the details, so if you want to learn more about building workflows to orchestrate the Delivery Center - sign up now!

Here are the details:
Title: Hands-on with the Citrix Delivery Center - featuring Workflow Studio orchestration and Citrix Receiver
Session Number: iForumLL706
Track(s): Learning Labs
Room: Premier Ballroom 306

This workshop provides attendees a chance to get hands-on experience with Receiver and Workflow Studio in a Citrix Delivery Center environment. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding for the architecture of these products and best practices for deploying them. Attendees will learn how to create and configure workflows that orchestrate functionality like power management, user provisioning, dynamic resource allocation, disaster recovery and product automation. Attendees will also learn how to configure the Receiver and leverage it to easily provide user access to applications and desktops—simplifying client management for IT.

Prerequisites:
Basic understanding of Citrix XenApp, Citrix NetScaler and Windows administration.
Students are required to bring their own laptops.

This session is held:
• Tuesday, May 5 at 11:30 a.m.
• Tuesday, May 5 at 3:00 p.m
• Wednesday, May 6 at 11:30 a.m.
• Wednesday, May 6 at 3:00 p.m.

I will be speaking about Workflow Studio at the upcoming Citrix Synergy event. Come by and here about what is coming next with Workflow Studio and if you have ideas for things you want covered, post them here or email me.

Here are the details:

Title: Go with the flow - Workflow Studio simplifies IT management and reduces costs
Session Number: iForum207
Track(s): iForum
Date / Time: May 7, 10:00 am - 10:50 am
Room: Premier Ballroom 310

According to industry analysts, 80 percent of unplanned downtime is due to "people failures" and 80 percent of IT budgets are spent just keeping the business running. Citrix Delivery Center simplifies IT by eliminating manual processes that are labor intensive and error prone with Workflow Studio, a process automation solution that enables you to compose, integrate and orchestrate rule-based workflows across your IT infrastructure. Power management, dynamic resource allocation and disaster recovery are just a few of the solutions that can be automated using Workflow Studio. Go with the flow and turn your IT infrastructure into a dynamic delivery center.

In this session you will learn:
• What Workflow Studio is and how it works
• How to build workflows that reduce power usage and maximize server utilization
• How to integrate Workflow Studio with your management systems

I just posted a video tutorial on using the Workflow Studio SDK to to convert a PowerShell cmdlet to an activity library on the Multimedia section of the Workflow Studio CDN site

This tutorial walks you through creating an activity library from the Get-Date PowerShell cmdlet just like the tutorial in the Developer's guide. The SDK and Developer Guide is available here:
http://community.citrix.com/cdn/wf/sdks

Here is the video:

Getting Started with the Workflow Studio SDK

Get started converting your own favorite PowerShell cmdlets and let us know what you find.

I posted two video tutorials to the Multimedia section of the Workflow Studio CDN site:
http://community.citrix.com/cdn/wf/multimedia/

These tutorials walk you through the two tutorials that are included with Workflow Studio in the Help menu. These tutorials are also in the User Guide which can be downloaded on the Workflow Studio download page. Hopefully these videos provide a little additional insight into the process.

Here are direct links to the videos:

Getting Started with Workflow Studio

Getting Started with the Workflow Studio Designer

Let me know what you think...

In my post on the "Three Audiences of Workflow Studio" I tried to explain how different features of Workflow Studio are used by different audiences. With the release of our Developer Toolkit we now also have 3 tutorials available that correspond to the 3 audiences:

1. IT Operations - There is a tutorial available from the main Workflow Studio console (the Management console) on the Help...Getting Started menu that walks you through the process of downloading a workflow, importing it, and then scheduling it to run.
2. Server Administrator - There is a tutorial available from the Workflow Studio Designer on the Help...User Guide menu that walks you through the process of creating the same workflow that is available for download above.
3. Software Developer - There is a tutorial available in the Developer's Guide that walks you through the process of creating new activity libraries - both converting from PowerShell and writing from scratch.

The first two tutorials that are available within Workflow Studio are also part of a larger User's Guide that is available on the product download page.

The final tutorial is available on the SDK download page.

We have just released a developer toolkit that will make creating activity libraries much easier. This toolkit contains a set of templates for Visual Studio and a PowerShell Converter utility. With the PowerShell Converter you can automatically generate an activity library from any PowerShell snap-in that you have installed. You can download it here:

http://community.citrix.com/cdn/wf/sdks

If you are a part of the Software Developer audience for Workflow Studio you definitely want to check this out. If you have comments or questions you can use the Activity Library Development forum.

Alex posted in our forums that he was extremely disappointed in the 1.0 release of Workflow Studio because of a lack of libraries/templates for use with Citrix products. We are working on releasing libraries for Citrix products, as well as libraries that integrate with Active Directory, Group Policy, Power Management, and Windows. I appreciate the criticism, as it made me realize that we haven't done a good job of describing the target audience of this 1.0 release. I would like to take the opportunity to explain the different audiences that Workflow Studio appeals to, and why we released 1.0 as it is. Hopefully this post will help to explain how the different features of Workflow Studio appeal to these audiences and also clarify how it can be used today and where we are going in the future.

To make sure we are all on the same page, I want to start by defining the audiences that I will refer back to later. The titles I chose are not important, but hopefully the descriptions will help you to place where this fits in your organization. In the IT industry people often wear many hats and don't fit neatly into a classification.

• IT Operations - This role is responsible for ensuring that IT systems are working and available on a wide scale, but would not typically do development or scripting tasks.
• Server Administrator - This role is responsible for specific server workloads and is intimately familiar with the software running on a system. They are comfortable with batch files, scripting, PowerShell, etc. but would not be comfortable doing traditional software development.
• Software Developer - This role is defined by people who write software that is either sold (Software Companies, System Integrators, Consultants, etc.) or used internally by other groups (often including the above two audiences.)

Workflow Studio is built on top of two technologies from Microsoft - Windows PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation. Linking these technologies to the audiences from above for PowerShell would be the Server Administrator, and for Workflow Foundation would be the Software Developer. Our intent with Workflow Studio is to merge these two technologies together and offer solutions that appeal to the IT Operations staff (and Server Administrators who are looking for tools, but are too busy to script solutions to all their needs themselves.) As a result of being built on top of PowerShell and Workflow Foundation, we offer features that the other two audiences will also find useful.

As Alex pointed out, the 1.0 release is not very interesting to the IT Operations audience yet because there isn't a large base of activity libraries and workflows available today. The Software Developer audience on the other hand can use 1.0 today with the publicly available APIs for our Citrix products (and if they choose, share or sell their work to the community at large.)

Now I want to take a look at specific features and functionality of Workflow Studio and how they map to these audiences:

IT Operations
The intended process of using Workflow Studio for this audience would be to download workflows (and activity libraries) that solve specific problems that this audience faces. All that needs to be done after downloading the workflows is to schedule or execute them as applications that solve those specific needs.

Workflow Studio has a community tab that links the product back to the Citrix Developer Network (CDN). Citrix, our partners, and the community at large can post activity libraries and workflows that can be downloaded and used without any need to write scripts or code. We built in a tutorial workflow called ExportServices that you can access through the Help menu to see how this process is intended to work. We plan to leverage this mechanism to release activity libraries and workflows to address specific problems faced in deploying the Citrix Delivery Center and the Citrix Cloud Center. We are also looking to our partners and community to build additional libraries and workflows that this audience will find valuable.

Obviously, this audience will not be well served until pre-built workflows are available that solve problems you face in your environment. Let me know in the comments or through email what types of things you would like to see. As we release activity libraries we will also release workflows that relate to them and as more are available we will be able to release more integrated workflows as well.

Server Administrator
The intended use case for this audience is to build and modify workflows using the Workflow Studio Designer for use either internally or to share with the community.

We are working on some activity libraries that will be available in coming weeks that will facilitate building workflows that leverage your existing VBScript and PowerShell scripts. This functionality will enable this audience to leverage their existing scripting knowledge in a more visual, database-driven, automatically versioned, and easily share-able way. Workflows can be extended through C# with the code-beside feature, so if you know a little bit of programming you can automate almost anything that .NET and C# will allow with just the Designer and not need to go into Visual Studio to build native activity libraries. We have built in some pretty powerful extensions to Workflow Foundation in our Designer that will help you be more productive and make it easy to share within your group, organization, or the community. For instance, the snippets functionality allows you to save templates of individual activity configurations or groups of activities and then export and reuse/share them. Workflows themselves can also be exported and reused/shared as well. The Workflow Studio Designer is accessed by either creating a New Workflow or editing an existing workflow. You can also download other workflows and edit them to see how they were built.

This audience needs activity libraries available, and we are working on several that will be released in coming months. Active Directory, Group Policy, Windows, Power Management, and Citrix product support are all coming soon, so stay tuned.

Software Developer
The intended use case for this audience is to build and share/sell activity libraries that the above two audiences will find useful. These can target Workflow Studio directly or target Workflow Foundation more generically as the vendors in my post on Workflow Studio Extensibility have done.

Activity Libraries are the mechanism for extending Workflow Studio. An activity library is a component defined by Microsoft as part of Workflow Foundation. These can be built without any knowledge of Workflow Studio (standard Workflow Foundation activity libraries), but there are some features of Workflow Studio that we think offer additional value. We make it easy to target Workflow Studio directly with a set of templates for Visual Studio. Specifically, we have a converter that will take existing PowerShell snap-ins and convert them to activity libraries automatically. You will soon be able to download these templates and documentation on automating Workflow Studio on our Download SDKs page.

Workflow Foundation and PowerShell have been around now for more than 2 years. These technologies are robust and stable and can easily be leveraged with the 1.0 release of Workflow Studio. If you are a Citrix partner (or want to be one) and have some ideas in this space, feel free to contact me to discuss.

Hopefully this will help clarify where we are with Workflow Studio and where we are going. Feel free to email me with comments or thoughts on how we can do a better job of addressing your needs with Workflow Studio - whichever audience you may fall into.

Workflow Studio leverages product SDKs to accomplish automation, so I want to take a moment to remind everyone that each of the Citrix products has their own SDK page on the CDN:

• XenApp - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xa/sdks
• XenServer - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xs/sdks
• XenDesktop - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xd/sdks
• NetScaler  - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/ns/sdks

Notice the similar link on the Workflow Studio page? Stay tuned...

One of the great features of Workflow Studio is that it is designed to be extended. You can build your own activity libraries that add additional graphical objects to the product. The Activity Library standard was created by Microsoft and first hit the scene with the .NET Framework 3.0 release back in Nov. 2006. I did a little searching and found three companies that are offering activity libraries for sale. If you are looking for integration with FTP, ZIP, GZIP, TAR, SSH, and more into your workflows these companies might just save you some time:

• Xceed Activities for WF
• Eldos SecureBlackbox for Business Servers (Workflow Foundation edition)
• /n software Workflow Activities V3
  
  

Looking at the feature descriptions, the /n software product really stands out. In addition to FTP and ZIP activities, it has activities that natively support email, paging, RSS, and Instant Messaging. I can think of some good uses for all those communication types when a workflow detects something in the data center that needs my attention immediately. Even more intriguing though is that they have an Amazon S3 activity - automatic backups to the cloud anyone?

The Workflow Studio section of the  Citrix Knowledge Center is now live:
http://support.citrix.com/product/wfs/v1.0/

The Knowledge Center is a great resource for all Citrix products and technologies. In fact, there is already a TechNote posted on how to manually edit global parameters through code in Workflow Studio. Gives me an idea for a series of blog posts...

Workflow Studio includes two tutorials that can be accessed from the Help menu. When you first launch Workflow Studio, you are in the management console:

The first tutorial can be accessed by clicking on the "Help...Getting Started" menu option. This will launch the Getting Started guide which is a tutorial that will walk you through the process of downloading a sample Workflow called ExportServices from CDN (using the built-in Community tab) and then running that workflow from the management interface.
Note: The tutorial is in PDF format. On many systems nothing will happen when you click on the "Help...Getting Started" link if you don't already have a PDF viewer already installed. Sorry about that - we will fix that in the next release.

The second tutorial is available from the Designer interface. The Designer interface is what is used to create or edit a workflow and looks very similar to the Tech Preview user interface:

This tutorial will take you through the process of creating the sample workflow that you saw in the first tutorial. This will demonstrate many of the techniques you will use to build workflows.

If you have any questions on either of these tutorials - post them here. In a future post I will explain some more details behind the Designer interface. Look for more tutorials and samples soon as well.