12 Mar 2008 01:36 PM EDT


 
The XenApp User Experience breaks down into two camps:

1: The Transparent Integrated Desktop Experience -- In this model the users primary interface is either a Windows or Mac desktop. Some of their applications are locally installed and some are being delivered by XenApp. The best experience that Citrix could provide is one that completely obscures the apps mode of delivery. In short, users shouldn't be able to tell the difference between locally installed and Citrix delivered apps.


2: The Web Everywhere Experience- The Web based model is a story of consistency and ubiquity. Regardless of whether a user is connecting from their PC at work, at home or at a public kiosk the experience is always the same. Browse to a URL, enter your credentials and launch your apps.


Citrix covers these scenarios today with Program Neighborhood Agent and The XenApp Web Interface respectively. While it's difficult for us to measure the exact numbers the balance seems to lean toward the Web everywhere experience. The question is why ? There is a big focus on enhancing the transparent experience and a strong belief that If we get it right the Web UI will become virtually unnecessary.


So, Are we right ? What's stopping you from moving over to Program Neighborhood Agent and the Transparent Desktop Experience ?

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Two things...

Remote Access from an Internet Kiosk

Remote Access using Advanced Access Control and End Point Analysis.  

Both of these scenarios only work well with the Web Interface at the moment.

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 12, 2008 13:43 | Reply To This

We can expand kiosk access to any PC that you share with others or that belongs to someone else. This model will continue to lend itself to the Web Everywhere model. Transparent access requires software to be installed with administrator privileges and will, by its very design, make it easy to re-establish a connection to the users remote apps and data. We wouldn't want to enable transparent access where it isn't appropriate or safe.

Smart Access could integrate with transparency. A user may want transparent access from their home PC but the provider may want to restrict the users access based on an analysis of their workstation. If a user is connecting from a completely unknown device like a kiosk we would probably be inclined to restrict the users access severely.

Posted by Albert Grandville at Mar 12, 2008 14:48 | Reply To This

Being a Citrix Partner, most of our customers use the Web Interface.  My customers appreciate the ability to customize the user experiance for their needs and environment.

 For our customers, the Web Interface means Web Everywhere / Applications Everywhere.

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 12, 2008 16:18 | Reply To This

Albert I can let you know that nearly every engagement I walk into I'm extolling the great virtues of PNAgent for the transparency reason.  I am seeing a lot of people that have never looked beyond Web Interface or the full Program Neighborhood and it blows them away when they see PNAgent working and delivering apps with ease and transparency.

Cheers

Michael

Posted by Michael Keen at Mar 12, 2008 17:35 | Reply To This

It sounds good until you try to upgrade to PNA 10 and you start getting errors like "Program Neighborhood Agent could not contact the server.  Please check your network connection."  Please browse our thread here: https://hqextsrvsft01.citrix.com/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=8&threadID=92360.  In my opinion Citrix doesn't support PNA very well so why use it?

Joe

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 13, 2008 17:26 | Reply To This

Hi Joe,

I'm really sorry you've had such a frustrating experience with the new PNAgent.  From scanning the support thread, it looks like the problem was related to connecting via Secure Gateway - that at least is a scenario that we are supporting in the upcoming XenApp release; it wasn't formally supported before although I know quite a few customers do use it that way.

It wasn't clear whether you (or others commenting on the thread) also had problems with SSL certificate validation - the new PNAgent is now strict about only allowing connections to WI servers with a completely valid certificate.  (This is in line with the way IE7 tightened up on certification validation, except PNAgent doesn't provide any way for the user to override and continue when the certificate is dodgy.)

Finally, as the new architect for PNAgent let me comment on the level of support it receives.  I think it is only fair to acknowledge that PNAgent hasn't always received the same level of attention that Web Interface has.  I don't mean that it has been neglected in terms of testing, bug fixing etc, but in terms of reviewing its overall design and behaviour to see if it is a good fit for what customers actually want.  My own conclusion, as I've come to understand more of what it does and how it works in detail, is that it is in some ways a strange beast with many quirks that's taken on a life of its own.  It feels to me like something that has accreted features over the years based on customer requests ("could you just put in a switch to do X..."), and the additions have not always been well-integrated with the features it already had.  Put another way, we haven't always kept sight of the mjaority use cases that should work well, and the feature creep for "fringe" cases has been allowed to detract from them.  That is something we (Al and I for a start) are firmly committed to fixing.

We know that the majority of end users today are connected to their Citrix apps via Web Interface, but logically it would seem that desktop integration of the kind PNAgent tries to provide would be more natural in many cases (maybe it should be more like a 50/50 split).  Our conclusion is that PNAgent needs to be significantly revised in terms of the overall design ("what it does"), as well as needing more attention to detail in all sorts of places (from being more intelligent in tracking network connectivity right down to the wording of error messages that all too often are obtuse or give the user no idea what to do).

Cheers,
AndrewI

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 13, 2008 19:24 | Reply To This

Sorry - for some reason that got recorded as anonymous rather than as Andrew Innes.  Maybe I spent too long writing the comment and my login got timed out...

Posted by Andrew Innes at Mar 13, 2008 19:28 | Reply To This

Wait a minute...

PNAgent? Please XenApp uses AppReceiver....

http://www.frameworkx.com/blogpost.aspx?id=1&c=1117

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 13, 2008 19:10 | Reply To This

Hi Gus,

Thanks for the info and screenshots - I didn't know we had shipped a build of PNAgent branded as App Receiver!  (I know we've been playing with names of components quite a lot lately, and various components have had new names in Tech Preview and Beta builds sometimes only to change shortly afterwards...)

It's an interesting point because there is an internal discussion in Citrix right now about what exactly the App Receiver is, and how it relates to PNAgent and XenApp.  I personally would say it is fair for people to think of "App Receiver: The Vision" as describing a new generation of PNAgent bundled with other client components, tying together the broadening collection of complementary capabilities our different products have to offer.  (But then you might expect me to say that, as architect for the component formerly known as PNAgent. )

Certainly some of the core things the App Receiver is expected to do are things that PNAgent does today, or could easily evolve to do, but there are visions and plans for it to do considerably more.  I really really hope I can scrape enough time away from my day job to start saying more about this soon.

Cheers,
AndrewI

Posted by Andrew Innes at Mar 13, 2008 19:44 | Reply To This

Any word on getting PNAgent running on a OS X? it'd be more convenient than manually creating the ICA files or directing users to the WI. If that happened my installation would be 95% Transparent and 5% Web instead of about 25% Transparent. We use WI to give access to vendor support instead of VNC or PC Anywhere. It's simpler than VPNs and firewall configuration.

Posted by Nathan Borg at Mar 13, 2008 20:37 | Reply To This

Hi Nathan,

PNAgent or App Receiver for Mac is definitely on the roadmap, though I can't give a time frame. For what it's worth, the new PNAgent included in 10.1 on Windows was specifically written to be portable, but the Mac team has been busy catching up on more fundamental feature gaps so hasn't had a chance to incorporate it yet.

Would it help for me to say that our CEO, the head of our main product division, and quite a few other influential people in Citrix use Macs a lot?

Cheers,
AndrewI

Posted by Andrew Innes at Mar 13, 2008 21:20 | Reply To This

PNAgent isn't going to be re branded as App Receiver. The name of PNA is changing to "Citrix Applications" which will plug into the larger, more holistic, client delivery solution known as "App Receiver".

Al-

Posted by Albert Grandville at Mar 14, 2008 08:46Updated by Albert Grandville | Reply To This

As we are looking to migrate our files and web content to SharePoint we are looking at leveraging WISP 2007 (still have not got it to work though).  We have a lot of Mac users and WI today allows us a common look and feel for all platforms and users.  At some point using "offline" applications will get more attention, and we'll need to look closer at the App Reciever.

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 14, 2008 09:49 | Reply To This

third camp:
3: Full desktop
Company users start their thin client and connect to the companies published desktop. Inside the desktop PNA is used to offer all or only silo'd apps.
Outside the company people start Web Interface (via SG or CAG) and choose their published desktop and experience their company workplace.
For me this is the Transparent Desktop Experience.

Fat clients with a couple of local applications also use the full desktop and their local apps are integrated into the published desktop with something like RES subscriber agent

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 14, 2008 18:59 | Reply To This

At this stage, with the only the Web UI and PN only allowing for Secure ID/ 2 layer authentication then there is still a need for the web interface, especially for "outside the fence" access.

Depending on the site and requirements, I have implemented a Web UI or a PN implementation mainly because we use Citrix as a centralisation tool as much as an application delivery tool. From this we need to develop a mindset for the users, which is, "anything you load inside the Citrix Web UI or PN window is company related".

 Don't get me wrong, I love the PN agent and have deployed it in our own company (an IT consultant firm) and have done it also for relevent key people in client firms. But in the case where you are using it as a Xenapp as a centralisation tool as well as an application delivery tool then it might be preferable for users to be able to differentiate between their local environment and their company environment. Even if it is as basic as where they are launching their applications from.

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 17, 2008 19:48 | Reply To This

Because the server guys don't want to have to provide desktop support and the desktop guys know nothing about Citrix. I've been working with Citrix products since '99, and the best way to provide applications in a large enterprise environment, with the least amount of support required by the server team, is Web Interface hands down. While I like what PNA (or whatever it will be called next week) has to offer, it provides too many opportunites for the user to mess it up on their end. Regardless of what most end users will tell you, short of surfing the web, reading e-mail and running a small handful of applications to get their jobs done, the vast majority of them can't compute their way out of a paper bag (a few sys admins, too). Web Interface is pretty tough for most users to screw up (I didn't say impossible)...

Posted by Anonymous at Mar 17, 2008 22:05 | Reply To This

I try to use PNAgent whenever possible. The big problem is that Citrix stopped supporting it through the Secure Gateway and it has never worked through Access Gateway. It's been a while since any customer has requested the full virtual desktop, but PNAgent is the way to go inside the desktop session.

For the most part I shy away from using Web Interface because of the need to tweak browser settings and other issues when the browser's cache goes rotten. It also gives strange timeouts on occasion, even when all the documented workarounds have been put in place. I only recommend WI when users are on public computers.

PNAgent as of recent has been quite reliable compared to Web Interface.

-Harder

Posted by Anonymous at Apr 28, 2008 16:17 | Reply To This