After I found the XenDesktop Caveman video, I came across this video.  Again, I am not sure who made this, thought since it says "Access TV" I am assuming it was some employees in Europe. It is worth a chuckle or two.

In case you are interested, here is a link to BitBurger.

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Hello, 
 
My name is Rene Alfonso and I have been working for Citrix Technical Support for about 10 years.  During which time I have worked in many areas of support. I remember when we only had 2 products (WinFrame and WinView).  I have developed a number of support tools including RM Web Console,  Medevac, DSDaig, SQL Replication Test Tool, and CtxTrace. 

I am currently on the Knowledge Base management team.  
I am new to blogging but would like to use this as an opportunity discuss new knowledge base projects and collect feedback on what's important to our users.
 
Stay tuned for more information and thanks for stopping by.

 
 Regards,
Rene
 
FYI Very cool video I found on YouTube on Citrix technologies.
               
  

As you may have noticed, we recently launched a major overhaul to the Knowledge Center website.  This initiative was launched several months ago and was sponsored because of excellent feedback from you.   You highlighted some of the shortcomings in our existing site such as search, navigation and notification emails.  You also identified core functionality that is commonplace throughout the industry such as RSS feeds and social bookmarking.

The project started with a full usability study and information architecture review and included several infrastructure changes as well as investments in Google Search technology.  Under the hood, several changes were made to make our site even more friendly for external search engines such as Google.  After all, Google plays the part of our home page for more than 60% of visitors.  You can read more about the changes here.

Now for the real reason I'm posting... 

While most of the feedback from the new site was positive in the first few weeks, we did receive constructive criticism around the ability to find language specific hotfixes and product documentation.  It became obvious that we made a few poor decisions around usability in this area so we focused the team on correcting this in the first follow-up release.  As of last Friday, we added new language specific filters on the product pages to help track down hotfixes and product documentation for the various product specific languages.  Here are a couple screen shots of the new functionality. 

And once you choose a different language:

Please give it a shot and be sure to let us know how else we can improve.  We actively monitor the feedback mechanism that is located in the footer of each page.  This goes for this new Official Citrix Blog site as well.

Thanks,

Saul 

There seems to be some confusion about XenDesktop relating to where it can run the workstations.  The name XenDesktop implies that it can only run with Xen but the truth is that it has been designed for running on other platforms as well.  Specifically, it can run on individual workstations (without virtualization), blade servers (also without virtualization), and virtualization servers.  The key message is that other VM providers can be supported as well.

XenDesktop really is not about locking you into a particular solution but rather to give you flexibility to create an environment that you want and can support.

The model is not radically new but it is new for Citrix to be embracing this model fully with an intent to have a full solution across the whole application delivery market (including desktop delivery).

The key technology for enabling the remoting of workstations is codenamed "PortICA" and has now been in development for more than two years.  PortICA allows Windows XP and Vista to be accessed remotely using standard ICA Clients and using standard Citrix infrastructure.  The goal of PortICA has been to port elements of Presentation Server to a workstation and that goal is almost complete.

PortICA is a project based out of Advanced Products in Sydney, Australia.  The team consists of six developers.  I'm only mentioning this to convey how big things can come from small teams.  The Advanced Products team in Sydney has produced a number of products and enhancements over the years including things like the Citrix Secure Gateway, Seamless support, SmartAuditor, AIE (App isolation), SpeedScreen (various flavours), ZL (Zero Latency), ICA Client Object, and Pictor.  It is a solid team with diverse experience.  The only limit the group has is based on not having enough people to tackle bigger or more projects.

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