There are plans to bring XenApp-on-FMA back in line with the features from XenApp-on-IMA. Read Citrix blog below or click here.
Change is good, but never happens at the right time
2014 is starting out to be a very exciting year! On a personal level, I’m be celebrating my 10th year anniversary at Citrix this month! I started as product manager on MetaFrame Secure Access Manager in 2004, and spent the last 8 years focused on Presentation Server/XenApp and also XenDesktop. Since my start at Citrix, Citrix’s product portfolio has grown significantly, notably: networking, server-virt, collaboration and mobile.
As in everyday life, we know change is difficult, but change is also necessary to growth and adapt, in our case, to evolving business needs. The big change and challenge for me at Citrix came when we started the architecture change from MetaFrame/XenApp on IMA to the FlexCast Management Architecture (FMA) with XenDesktop 7.0 App edition.
And many of you have voiced your questions and concerns about the platform change and features you rely on for your business. Thus, I want to take this opportunity to kick off a blog series on things we’re working on for XenApp and XenDesktop. Over the next 4 weeks – every Monday & Wednesday, my engineering colleagues will be blogging about technology and features they’re working on… and what those features mean for XenApp and XenDesktop customers.
Future of XenApp – Getting down to nuts & bolts
As many of you saw, we just released our XenApp & XenDesktop 7.5 on March 26. XenApp & XenDesktop 7.5 introduced a number of key features enabling enterprise customers to provision to Citrix CloudPlatform and AWS their XenApp & XenDesktop workloads, along with Wake-on-LAN for Remote PC Access, full feature AppDNA and promotion for XenMobile.
While they’re very exciting news, I’ve also received many questions about the future of XenApp project management team. Specifically, questions/comments that XenApp 7.5 and the FMA are different (than XenApp-IMA), and what about the resilience and user experience features that XenApp 6.5 customers use today, like: local host cache, session pre-launch and linger, anonymous login, migration from XenApp 6.5, etc. So, what does that future look like?
Now that XenApp and XenDesktop share the same management and delivery platform, not only will customers be able to deploy a single architecture for delivering apps and desktops…, but customers should expect to see many features previously only available to XenApp deployments will also be available for XenDesktop/VDI use cases as well.
Now that we have a solid and scalable FlexCast Management Architecture for delivering XenApp and XenDesktop, we want to focus on cementing the platform to ensure a more consistent feature set.
Show me the progress…
Naturally, the next questions are… what are we doing and when are we doing them.
If blogs and videos aren’t enough, we plan to demonstrate a number of these features at Synergy in May. For those of you planning to be there, you’ll get to see some of these technology first hand.
So, to wrap up for now…. It’s going to be a very busy year in 2014 for XenApp & XenDesktop. Stay tuned for upcoming exciting information!
