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

The views expressed here are mine alone and have not been authorized by, and do not necessarily reflect the views of, Citrix.

Typically, an admin that implements the Access Gateway Enterprise Edition(AGEE), find themselves deciding how to lock down the environment that the users will connect to.  I have been asked many times what the "Best Practice" would be to restrict or allow access to their users.  What I like to explain is that the normal security guidelines come into play first, however each environment can differ based on company security policies and application delivery goals. 

What I like most about the AGEE, aside from multiple vServers, automated failover, enterprise scalability, policy control, etc.. is the flexibility to provide secure remote access to Presentation Server applications without using a "VPN" client. The AGEE's is called the Secure Access Client(SAC).  The SAC is there if needed, and all of the granular access policies can be applied to the full "VPN" tunnel.  The flexibility to give users access to just Presentation Server application and/or a full desktop experience is only outdone by the ease and flexibility of the policies that can determine the users logon session environment.......  This is called SmartAccess and it gets performed via the AGEE appliance itself.

Bottom line with using policies is to make sure you start with a solid design.  Included in that design should be what kind of users will be connecting and what resources they will need access to.  From there, you will need to decide on if you need to run Pre-Authentication Policies to grant/deny access to the logon page as well as determining other features that the users will have during their session.  In addition, you will need to determine if you need to setup any policies to run End-Point Analysis after their credentials are entered to filter Presentation Server applications and/or grant/deny access to other resources, including the entire session.

This is just the beginning, there are many other features provided by the AGEE as well as many different combinations of how to apply policy and dynamically create the users logon environment when connecting via the AGEE.  I hope after reading this, you too will be excited about the power and flexibility of the AGEE and remember to keep in mind how important an initial design is to maximize the AGEEs full potential. 

The views expressed here are mine alone and have not been authorized by, and do not necessarily reflect the views of, Citrix.

When implementing a "VDI" solution, most admins focus on the "Desktop".  What should the desktop look like, how many will be the same, who can access them, where do I run the desktop from and store my images.  Moving forward, the admins think about items like how they need to update the desktops with OS updates and or security patches.

I find that many times, applications are not thought about in the whole solutions from the admin point of view.  How are the applications going to be delivered to the end-user, how are the applications going to be managed.  Typically when this question arises, the answer is to install the applications on the desktop images just as they would be at the user's desk.  So let's look at the benefits of this so far........   Centralizing the desktop in the data center give you full control and security over of the desktops.  By installing the applications on the desktop images, you are also centralizing the application installs to the data center.  The downside to both of these would be when it comes to managing and maintaining the implementation(updating the desktop and the applications).

XenDesktop gives the admin a great way to reduce the headache and time associated with updating both the desktop and the applications.  XenDesktop can be fully integrated with Presentation Server.  This means that you can deliver a desktop from the data center to an end user, wherever they may be, and then deliver their applications to that desktop from Presentation Server in that same data center.  For companies currently running Presentation Server most application may already be setup and ready to be accessed from that centrally deliver desktop.   So now the applications are dynamically delivered to the desktop that is presented to the end user.  This allows the desktops images to be more flexible since the applications are not installed locally and no matter which desktop from a pool is presented to the user, the user can get the applications they have access to via Presentation Server and the ICA client residing on the delivered desktop.  These applications can be updated in the datacenter via a package that is being streamed to the Presentation Server or installed on the Presentation server.  Either way, the updates are done only on the package or the installed application on the Presentation Server.......not on every desktop image.

In addition to the applications, the desktop can be created as a single image or a few images based on your needs.  This image or images can then be streamed to the hypervisor on-demand when needed for a requesting user, via the Provisioning Server.  This way, you would only need to make updates to the "gold" image and then have it stream the updated desktop image to the user.  This method allows the admin to save space, time and pain of maintaining a desktop image for each user.

I hope that after reading this, you will have a good understanding of how much XenDesktop and Presentation Server can work together to provide an entire Desktop and Application Delivery system.  To allow users access to this system via a Secure Remote connection........ Implement Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise Edition.