17 Mar 2008 01:22 PM EDT


   

    OK. So I'm airing some rather grungy laundry here but, for good reasons I'm sure, our internal implementation of XenApp serves up some 80 + apps to every user.  It's a pretty tough list to manage but, believe it or not, I've heard horror stories that some folks out there are dealing with hundreds and sometimes thousands (yes thousands) of published apps. You can just imagine how painful it must be for users to sort through such a cumbersome list every time they want to launch an app. XenApp provides tools to publish apps to only the subset of users who need them. This, of course, implies that the folks who set up XenApp had the time, resource and the information available to make these decisions. It's difficult to know how many user actually struggle with this problem but it still seems like an obvious place to uplift the users experience. The question is how we go about it.

Option 1 - Fine Tune Citrix Applications

    Citrix Applications allows users to move shortcuts to their desktop, quick launch bar, Vista gadget, etc ... Users can take advantage of all the methods that the OS provides to allow for quick access to his/her most commonly launched applications. There are some areas that still call for refinement like  full support for the recently used apps list in the Start Menu (right now we only show the last app launched ).

Option 2 - Favorites

    We could provide a method that allows users to create a list of favorite  apps. Once the list exists it would act as a filter and the users would only see their list of favorites. We would provide an interface to configure the list and to show the entire list again if the user needs to access an infrequently used app.

Option 3 - Most Recently Used

    A Most Recently Used or MRU list would build as users launched applications. When a user accessed the list their MRU entries would be their primary view with an easy way to expand the entire list if the user needs to access an infrequently used app. The size of the MRU list would be restricted to a small set of apps but could be made configurable by the user and/or the administrator.

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And keep in mind that maybe you do more than one option.  Various tools use both a Favorites and a History mechanism.  I personally like to keep some "every now and then" apps handy, but they'd likely never appear in my MRU list for very long.  So, I need both Options 2 and 3.  Or all three (Option 1 being desktop-based).

But do your users?

Scott

Posted by Scott Novack at Mar 17, 2008 14:44 | Reply To This

As of today, we have 1358 Published Applications published to our users (around 30,000). Not all applications are published to all users. Most are only published to a small group. Although this list is huge for the administrators, most users only see 10 or so applications at at time.

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 17, 2008 16:16 | Reply To This

Some variations of solution 2 already exist today.  There is some custom code for creating a favorite applications section on WI 3.0 , 4.0, 4.2 that can be found here.   http://www.thomaskoetzing.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=72&Itemid=111  It is likely that this can be migrated to WI 4.5/4.6 quite easily, but I have not had time or the requirement to do so.  Further, in WI 4.6 you can save shortcuts to specific applications to your desktop anyway.  This way you could double-click the application link on your desktop and go through WI and just launch that application, or logon to WI the standard way to get your entire application set.

Kevin

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 18, 2008 12:42 | Reply To This

We implemented a flavor of Solution 2 at one of our customers.  The Applications List was actually a two-tabbed affair, where the first tab to show up was a list of Home Applications that are configured by business group (i.e. Nurses, Doctors, Finance, Accounting) and the second tab was all applications published to that user.  We built a custom administration page to allow business group owners to configure the Home Application set for their respective set of users.  However, if this were integrated into the XenApp / WI, it might exist as a checkbox to "Enable tabbed Application Lists".  Then, as you publish an application, you can check a certain application as a "Home Application" for a given Security Group, or set of Security Groups.

The next phase that was discussed at this client was allowing the Home Application set to evolve  on a per-user basis, based on how often users used other applications.  Basically this is just tracking the applications a given individual launches.  As such, your often-used application that is not on the Home Applications list may eventually make its way over to your personal set of Home Applications (either in addition to or at the expense of other biz-group-owner-defined Home Applications).  This is the MRU case described above.

 Christian Buia | Critical Design Associates

Posted by Chris Buia at Mar 18, 2008 13:47 | Reply To This