Southwest Florida Water Management District is one of many Citrix XenApp customers using SpeedScreen Progressive Display to give remote users an excellent user experience when accessing a highly graphical application. On August 28th, Marc Versley (Lead System Administrator) and Axel Griner (Senior GIS Analyst) of Southwest Florida Water Management District will share insights into how they have configured their XenApp PS 4.5 system to deliver ESRI ArcGIS, an integrated system for authoring, serving and using geographic information. I'm really looking forward to this webinar as Marc and Axel are planning to give us an in-depth demonstration from both an admin and end user perspective, and share some valuable tips and tricks. So if you're interested in graphical application virtualization, I encourage you to register for this webinar, scheduled for August 28th at 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific, and learn about this topic straight from a customer who has this technology running in their production environment.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

AutoCAD Map 3D, first introduced in the mid 1990s, has become the leading engineering platform for creating and managing geospatial information, bringing together the CAD and GIS worlds so that spatial data can easily be integrated with design drawings. The software is widely used by utilities, government agencies and industries dealing with natural resources.

Citrix and Autodesk have just completed extensive verification and field testing using XenApp Presentation Server 4.5 to provide on-demand access to AutoCAD Map 3D 2009, which has now been validated as Citrix Ready. This is a great example of how Citrix multimedia virtualization technologies such as SpeedScreen Progressive Display and SpeedScreen Image Acceleration optimize the ICA protocol to provide an excellent user experience with graphical applications while increasing security and dramatically reducing management and workstation costs.

To learn more about the Citrix and Autodesk partnership and this solution, check out today's press release and this new web site: http://www.citrixandautodesk.com/.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

You may have already seen the Tolly Group's report on how SpeedScreen Progressive Display enables delivery of PACS images to healthcare workers over a variety of network types. But for me it is even more exciting to hear from customers actually experiencing this technology in the field. Recently I learned of a hospital network using XenApp 4.5 (formerly known as Presentation Server) to deliver radiography images from their Agfa IMPAX 6.2 image and information management system. I haven't asked permission to publish the name of the customer but I can share their observations with you. Interestingly, IMPAX 6 is billed by Agfa as a web-deployable PACS system since it offers a Java plug-in for Internet Explorer, yet the hospital found that performance over their WAN is significantly better using XenApp to publish the IMPAX application (Win32). On Windows XP PCs with at least a Pentium III processor and 256 MB of RAM (the oldest production PCs still in service across the 7,000 PCs on their network), performance is "exceptional". In fact, XenApp has successfully delivered "cine loops" where a series of up to 300 splices of a CT scan is displayed at 27 frames per second -- a very challenging use case! These observations were made with the users situated 5 miles down the road from the hospital's data center, connected over a gigabit network and through a 10 Mbps switch.

Have you started using SpeedScreen Progressive Display in your business? If so, please post a comment or send me an email.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization