Last Thursday I made the trek to Kansas City to attend the Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) XL meeting at Arrowhead Stadium. If your company uses Citrix, I highly recommend joining the CUGC. The Citrix User Group Community is run by Citrix users for Citrix users. You can connect with fellow technology professionals and gain peer insights into challenges they have faced which may save you time and effort in the future. It also permits an open exchange of ideas and information that is helpful for maintaining your environments. In addition, there are forums where you can ask questions and regular blog posts advising you of items that can be of interest. They also have regular webinars from Citrix and third-party applications that you can choose to watch. And they hold regional meetings like the one I attended last week where you can hear from industry experts on topics relevant to your deployment.
First, we heard from Martin Zugec @MartinZugec on VDI/RDS best practices. His blog post on the optimizer tool can be found here.
Paul Stansel @Pstansel discussed the pros and cons of migrating your Apps and Desktops workloads to Citrix Cloud.
Dave Brett @dbretty flew in from England to discuss nFactor and gave many examples of how and why to use it.
Following lunch it was on to Shane Kleinert @shanekleinert who informed us what Workspace is and what Workspace isn’t.
And wrapping up the speakers we heard from Patrick Coble @VDIHacker who told us all about security and the bare minimums we should be utilizing on our environments.
Then, we had some good round table discussions where you could ask the experts in each of a large group of topics. I moderated the Citrix SD-WAN table answering questions for users who were interested. We ended the day with some winners of prizes from the sponsors. The presentations will be available for download soon.
I highly recommend attending the local group meetings and the XL meetings whenever you can spare the time. The next XL meeting will be for the Northeast. More information can be gained here.