One key component in the Citrix VDI solution is the inclusion of communication. This is a clear distinction from other VDI solutions in the market because no one else has even considered adding communication as part of their VDI solution. When Citrix develops XenDesktop, we made a very concerted effort to design a VDI platform that is capable of supporting the next evolution of desktops or operating systems.

There are numerous market drivers that propel Citrix to make EasyCall part of XenDesktop. In enterprises today, the line between the IT and the telecom organizations have been blurred. In many cases, there's no longer a separate organization that handles only telecom. A lot of telecom organizations have been folded into the IT organizations. Applications from Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and more are key culprits in that transition as they increasingly make communication as a core part of their applications. As much as some IT tries to separate communication and application, it's no longer realistic to do so. Enterprise users have already been making voice calls from their PCs, IT can no longer ignore this new reality.

Citrix is fully aware of this communication trend and we are addressing this heads on for our customers so that our customers are well prepared to handle this. With Citrix XenDesktop having communication as part of its core competency, organizations would not have to scramble later to find telephony vendors to add communication.  And telephony vendors are the last place to look for a VDI communication solution as these folks have even yet to understand how applications work in the users' world today.

XenDesktop is not like the VDI solution as some of our competitor like to put it. It is actually at least one generation ahead of where they would like to be.

I'm sure many people are wondering why Citrix creates a quirky communication solution called EasyCall. Why does communication have to do with Citrix's core business?

The answer is: SIMPLICITY!

We all know how convenient it is to make phone calls from your cell phone. All you need to do is look up someone's name and hit dial. However, why is it that you cannot do the same with your PC? Your PC is arguable your most comprehensive and most powerful phone book in your possession.

And today, you are seeing more and more software and web applications that have chat and voice capabilities built into them. Just in the last few years, instant messaging clients from Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, etc have all embedded voice capability inside.  

 
You are also seeing an evolution led by Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, etc to add communication as just another feature within the applications. A good example is what you see below with Microsoft Outlook, you can simply click on the Smart Tag feature and call someone. Or from Adobe where its Acrobat includes a web collaboration feature. None of these communication capabilities are what you would traditionally associate with the software companies. Yet, these features are being introduced more and more by the software companies.

This is because for an average office worker, it is much easier to learn a simple new feature within the existing application than to learn an all new softphone interface that sits outside of that work environment. Softphone adds complexity to the user environment and has demonstrated a profound negative impact on its adoption rate. Softphone also introduces unnecessary challenges to the already stretched IT organization.

Since Citrix today can deliver thousands of business critical applications to the users, we simply add voice communication on top of those delivered applications. You can now call anyone from any applications without having to do any sort of integration work! This simple addition brings great values to the customers. This is why EasyCall is an integral part of the Citrix solution.

So check out EasyCall today here.

We recently conducted some tests to confirm that Office Communications Server 2007 can be delivered via Citrix Presentation Server 4.5. While these are not "official" test results, I thought many of you might appreciate an early look at what we found in case you're considering rolling out OCS 2007.

Office Communications Server, the successor to Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, is Microsoft's entry in the Unified Communications space. It brings together Voice-over-IP (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM), audio and video conferencing, and integration with Microsoft Office. OCS includes presence information so you can see at a glance whether someone is available to receive your phone call or instant message.

We didn't test video conferencing. That would require USB webcam support on Presentation Server. Our focus was on the Instant Messaging and Microsoft Office integration features of OCS 2007.

We published the Office Communicator client on Presentation Server and successfully used its Instant Messaging and presence functions. OCS integrates presence information from multiple sources including the Outlook calendar and Out-of-Office Assistant. From an e-mail message in Outlook, you can view the presence information for each addressee and then initiate real-time communications from within the message without switching applications.

Office Communicator can also be used to control a physical telephone set. For example, you can instruct Office Communicator to place a call in your behalf and, leveraging your telephone system, it will ring your phone (office, home, or mobile) and then call the other party and bridge the connections. You can't yet use Office Communicator on Presentation Server as a pure softphone with voice-over-ICA; one of the reasons is that softphones need to open the audio driver more than once (ringtone/busytone, voice) and the current audio driver in PS 4.5 FP1 doesn't support that. (We previewed an enhanced audio driver for softphone support and voice-over-ICA in the Tech Lab at iForum in October and I'll blog on various aspects of voice-over-IP in the new year.)

If you have any experiences running Office Communicator on Presentation Server that you'd like to share, please write a comment on this blog post. And I'll keep you informed as we learn more about delivering Unified Communications via Presentation Server and XenDesktop.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization