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This is an in-depth look on Virtual Desktop provisioning and lifecycle management using XenDesktop technologies.
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Twitter/GusPinto
The March of Dimes Walk for Babies
is in full swing. The Citrix office in Silicon Valley and the Citrix Online team have both recently created teams to help the March of Dimes Walk for Babies.
Wes Wasson, our SVP of Marketing, recently spoke at the March of Dimes March for Babies in the Bay Area in Northern California.
This video from the March of Dimes explains why the March for Babies is so important.
I know from personal experience the importance of research into birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. My daughter was born 7 weeks premature after many complications, and weighed about four pounds at birth. She was just about the size of my hand.
Thankfully, our sweet little girl is a very healthy and happy three year old today. Much of the thanks goes to the research supported by the March of Dimes and the March for Babies.
Find a March for Babies in your area.
Check out this quick tech-jive put together by the XenDesktop product group showing how close to a physical desktop your virtual desktop experience can be when delivered the right way.
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Twitter/GusPinto
I don't believe this footage ever made into the web.
This is a short video from the day Citrix announced the name change durring Summit 08 and the crowd's reaction was trully impressive, I remember seating all the in the back and I could only hear people yelling, shouting, and whistling for like a minute or two.
If you still doubt Citrix made the right choice, I would highly recomment watching this video.
Cheers,
Gus Pinto
Twitter/GusPinto
I really don't know the guys on this video, I know his hame is Charlie and based on their conversation I assume they work on the Citrix education group, maybe they don't even work for Citrix, however this is by far the best video explaining the Citrix Presentation Server -> XenApp name change I've seen.
I guess keeping it simple and using a whiteboard helps alot! 
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Follow Me
PS. Charlie, nice work!
Geek Speak made to several news site (view) this week when we officially announced Geek Speak Live as part of Synergy this year.
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Geek Speak Live!, the ultimate un-conference at Citrix Synergy 2008 where tech experts, industry analysts and bloggers take the reins - picking discussion topics and facilitating the sessions. Citrix Synergy, the all-new industry conference where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, will take place May 20 to May 23 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.
Sponsored by Intel, Geek Speak Live! is one of four industry events taking place at Citrix Synergy 2008. The other events include iForum User Conference, Application Delivery Industry Expo and IT 2.0 Business Symposium. GSL gives participants ultimate control, allowing them to drive the agenda and format of the event. Instead of watching traditional PowerPoint presentations, attendees will choose and vote on topics and lead group discussions. Rather than one-way lectures, GSL will feature a series of rapid-fire discussions led by widely recognized experts and thought leaders, both from Citrix and from the wider application delivery infrastructure community. Participants will meet other industry tech experts, analysts and bloggers with fresh viewpoints and compelling opinions about where technology is headed.
Geek Speak Live! will also feature a Gadget Lab where attendees can interact with a wide-range of technologies focused on application delivery. The lab will include graphically intensive, interactive software that will be delivered using application virtualization, as well as the latest small footprint portable devices, prototype devices from Intel and "BYOG" (bring your own gadget) where attendees can demonstrate their own gadgets and favorite tools.
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If you have not yet registered for Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and Geek Speak.
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Follow Me
From Forbes.com:
Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced it was named one of the top 10 places to work in the annual ranking of "100 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area" by the San Francisco Business Times, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal and East Bay Business Times. Citrix ranked ninth among companies with 101 to 500 employees in the Bay Area. The publications surveyed over 200,000 employees from more than 500 nominated companies, measuring their satisfaction on a wide array of topics including work culture, management and benefits. Winning companies were announced at an awards ceremony on Tuesday night, April 29, in San Francisco and a full list of winners was published by all three sponsoring publications on Friday, May 2.
Since earning a Top 20 spot in last year's awards, Citrix has continued to build momentum in the Bay Area, opening up a new Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara and growing its Bay Area presence to nearly 500 employees. This location now serves as a strategic second headquarters for the company, with aggressive growth plans for 2008 as Citrix continues to build its virtualization and networking solutions into an end-to-end infrastructure for application delivery.
"Silicon Valley is a geography that holds some of the world's most impressive engineering talent. We've continued to attract the best the Bay Area has to offer by bringing the innovative spirit of a startup and melding it with the stability of an established billion-dollar market leader," said Wes Wasson, chief marketing officer for Citrix. "To be recognized as one of the top 10 companies to work for in a region of so many esteemed companies is a tremendous honor, especially since our ranking is based directly on our employees' feedback about being a part of the Citrix family."
In this chat with the XenDesktop program team, we chat more about VDI and what it represents as well as some of the core functionalies of XenDesktop. I didn't forget to ask some hard questions around princing and why users should choose XenDesktop over other VDI solutions.
Cheers,
Gus Pinto
Follow Me
Joe Shonk, a technologist who spends tons of his time helping out the broad Citrix community, posted an really cool and simplistic (pictoral) article on how to publish multiple applications to Citrix XenApp servers without any scripts or extra tools, really cool stuff on his site.
Check it out his post and his site:
http://www.theshonkproject.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=35
Enjoy the reading...
Gus Pinto
Follow Me
Mark Templeton took the center stage at Ineterop Las Vegas 2008 and challenged the global IT community to do something different by optimizing networking services, virtualization, and application acceleration to create a dynamic application delivery infrastructure that enables a more flexible way of providing applications to users.
watch his keynote on "how Citrix has moved its business in new directions"
I think this is the most useful post ever for Citrix admins!
Seriously it has always been hard for me to find where and what are the latest hotfixes for the Citrix products... but this picture has changed.
With the new revision of Citrix's Support site (support.citrix.com), now it's easier to find the latest fixes and patchs for your Citrix products.
Here's the list:
Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows Server 2003 - x86
Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows Server 2003 - x64
Presentation Server 4.0 for Windows Server 2003 - x86
Presentation Server 4.0 for Windows Server 2000 - x86
Access Gateway 4.5 Advanced Edition
Access Gateway 4.5 Standard Edition
Access Gateway 8.0 Enterprise Edition
Provisioning Server 4.5
Citrix NetScaler 8.0
Citrix NetScaler 7.0
Citrix WANScaler 4.x
Select the products you have, subcribe to its RSS feed and stay in-sync with all later patches and fixes for it.
This is wicked useful!
Cheers,
Gus Pinto
Last week Dr. SDK completed his ultimate guide to MFCOM (101 pages). This is the only guide you will ever need to understand and learn about MFCOM SDK. It covers everything up to SDK version 4.5.
It covers all the advance MFCOM topics such as multifarm management, publishing different type of Applications, policies, load evaluators and more.
Hope you enjoy reading it.
The following Citrix virtualization white paper discusses how Citrix XenServer provides simple, economical server virtualization designed for easy implementation in any IT environment. From the simplicity of "10 Minutes to Xen" installation to a full range of complementary, best-of-breed solutions from independent solution providers, Citrix XenServer offers innovative, cost-effective solutions for application availability, business continuity, rapid provisioning, and end-to-end visibility and management across virtual and physical environments.
Adoption of virtualization is concentrated among large enterprises, while adoption by mid-sized companies has been much slower. For these companies, enterprise-focused virtualization solutions often present barriers including:
- fragmentation between new, virtualization-ready operating systems and legacy platforms running mission-critical applications
- application performance constrained by storage and network I/O on virtualized servers
- server and storage constraints imposed by virtualization platform providers
- security and resiliency concerns raised when multiple critical applications run on the same hardware
- implementation hurdles created by complex interdependencies and demanding installation protocols
- vendor lock-in issues, raising pricing and support risks many companies prefer to avoid
- application delivery constraints imposed at virtual/physical boundaries
Download the white paper here: Virtualization Everywhere
I have the challenge to help shape the Citrix Community and blogs. You probably know me very well from Frameworkx.com and the cool work we've done with our site, we have the experience on building high-end community sites and I could be very smug and spill some credentials here, etc... but instead I will turn the mic to you.
I want to know what YOU would like to see on the Citrix Communities.
That's right I will turn to you to help shape this community, I want to make this a fare and square process for everyone.
Citrix Community in a nutshell:
The Citrix Community has the mission to carry out Citrix culture and provide technology education, standing for a powerful ecosystem of partners, employees and customers.
What's next?
With that being said, I will start periodic pools where everyone can voice their preferences helping us shape the ultimate "community-driven" community! Do you follow?
It won't be long before we start collecting everyone's feedback, but in the meantime feel free to send me emails with ideas and suggestions (gus.pinto@citrix.com) or post your comments here.
This video is a follow-up from my previous one with a bit more information on the app, a greater insight on how it works and how it was built.
Stay tuned as I wil be releasing more information on Citrix Fast Launch on the next few days.
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Technology Evangelist
Microsoft MVP - Virtualization
*PS. Check out the HALO 3 sticker on the back of my notebook.
I want to thanks everyone who attended the webinar yesterday. If you missed the webinar then you can watch the recording at the following URL https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/114744868
You can also download the slide deck here Dowload link
If you are interested in learning PowerShell then subscribe to Brandon Shell rss feed. I totally love the way he explains PowerShell concepts.
I am going to send out a more detailed survey to everyone who attended the webinar. Your feedback will help us determine future webinars and chats.
| Would you like to see an advance PowerShell and MFCOM webinar? | Choose |
|---|---|
| Yes |  |
| No | |
| How would you rate yesterday's webinar on a scale to 1 to 5 with 5 being Awesome? | Choose |
|---|---|
| 1 Totally sucked | |
| 2 Just OK | |
| 3 Good stuff | |
| 4 Great. | |
| 5 Awesome | |
Please let me know via comments what SDK and technology webinar you would like to see in future. I will try my best to get the experts do it for CDN members.
Check out this video excerpt from Citrix Summit 08 of Citrix Delivery Center and its amazingly fast and easy provisioning of application workloads to virtual and physical servers. Presented by Pete Downing and Brad Peterson.
Learn hands down how to implement Citrix XenApp with NetScaler.
Here's a paper that can show you how.
Drive greater IT operating efficiency through integrated end-to-end virtualization to reduce costs,
maximize system availability, and drive operational agility.
Join top virtualization executives as Citrix and Microsoft discuss:
• Virtualization industry trends and how Microsoft and Citrix are joined to provide customers with best-of-breed solutions
• Key solutions for application, server, and desktop virtualization
• Reducing IT costs by 40% with Virtualization
Date: May 15, 2008 at 4:00 PM EDT/ 1:00 PM PDT
Continue to Registration: Citrix and Microsoft and the Future of Virtualization
This whitepaper outlines the best practices for implementing SAP GUI 7.10 for Windows using Citrix XenApp 4.5
