Community Roundtable

COMMUNITY ROUNDTABLE

Members discuss all things Citrix and CUGC, as well as other emerging technologies and topics relevant to the community.

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2019 Year-End Review

By Patrick Coble posted 6 days ago
2019 Year-End Review What an amazing year this was for the Citrix User Group Community, with so many members, meetings and new groups. This year added 4,500 new members, with 11 new groups started across the world! There were a total of 138 regular meetings and 8 XLs (Texas, Florida, Great Lakes, Great Plains, Midwest, Northeast, SoCal, Denmark).  I think the XLs are the best bang for anyone’s buck in the EUC and Citrix space to go to because they bring the best sessions, speakers and vendors\sponsors to a town close to you. It is worth a long drive or short flight and 1-2 nights in a hotel to come and learn more about the Citrix EUC ecosystem. If you cannot ...

Finding My Voice

By Jenny Sheerin posted 25 days ago
Finding My Voice “If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.” – (Warren Buffet)  Those words echoed in my brain. Last year, I was a mentee in the CUGC Women In Technology mentoring program . The experience was instrumental in helping me to gain confidence, amongst other things, and as a result, I felt empowered to speak up.  I recently had the fantastic opportunity to accomplish one of my goals, and I want to share with you how I found my voice with the help of a CUGC WiT mentor.  I somehow found the courage to co-present at a conference for experts. Yes, I said experts, EUC, Citrix ...

CUGC Great Lakes XL 2019

By Greg Tiber posted 11-12-2019
CUGC Great Lakes XL 2019 ​On September 26, 2019, the Chicago, Fox Valley, Madison and Milwaukee CUGC chapters joined forces again, this time at Miller Park in Milwaukee for the 2nd annual CUGC Great Lakes XL. This year, we had some great speakers: DJ Eshelman, Ron Oglesby, Theresa Miller, Ryan Butler & Jarian Gibson. Thank you to all of our amazing sponsors. I know we say this a lot, but without your support these events would not be possible!! DJ Eshelman, Citrix CTA @TheCitrixCoach led off the day with his presentation entitled "From Cubicle to Consultant: The Massive Career Opportunities in Citrix and EUC." DJ chronicled his path ...

SoCal XL 2019 Recap

By Jon Bucud posted 11-04-2019
SoCal XL 2019 Recap Thanks to your support and participation, we were able to pull off a great event in San Diego, CA for the EUC Community!       In title, this was the #SoCalXL, but we are excited to say there was great representation from the greater Southwest region. We had participants flying out from as far as Las Vegas for the event and great support from our CUGC family members in Phoenix on hand. Needless to say, our community continues to amaze me. It goes without question that our community is stronger because of YOU!     Regarding content, oh boy was there no shortage of great technical content! W e had the pleasure of taking ...

Midwest XL 2019 Recap

By Brandon Mitchell posted 10-04-2019
CUGC Midwest XL 2019 Cincinnati–home of the Reds, Skyline Chili and my adopted hometown–hosted the Second Annual Midwest XL. The Great American Ballpark, located off the mighty banks of the Ohio River, serves as the home of the Cincinnati Reds (baseball’s first professional team) and the now-legendary Midwest XL. The event brought together attendees from Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Northern Indiana CUGC local groups. Now a word from our sponsors– Citrix , Bitdefender , ControlUp , eG Innovations , IGEL , Liquidware , Numecent , Nutanix , and Pivot3 –without whom this day would not have been possible. Thanks for your ...
  CUGC Midwest XL

Q3 2019 Review of Ireland CUGC

By Ronnie Hamilton posted 09-26-2019
Q3 2019 Review of Ireland CUGC This year has totally flown by. Can you believe that the Q3 meeting for CUGC in Ireland has already completed? I usually write a brief overview of the day's antics over on ronnie.ie but this one is going out out on CUGC to see if we can reach some more Citrix community fans and to find out if they like what they see. Hopefully, they can come along and join in the fun. We were back to our usual venue, the Radisson Blu in Dame Lane, Dublin in a slightly larger room downstairs. I still prefer the sky suite on top of the hotel, which does have fabulous views of the city. It's a nice spot to have a few drinks and catch ...

CUGC Women in Tech Update: Adding Men to the Mentorship Support Team

By Esther Barthel posted 09-25-2019
CUGC Women in Tech Update: Adding Men to the Mentorship Support Team Our Women In Technology Mentorship Program has continued to grow and evolve over the past few years, and we're proud of the mentees who have steadily worked on and achieved their professional development and technological goals throughout each mentorship class. After our webinar last spring with Eva Hélen , who spoke about the importance of breaking down gender bias in the workplace and in the mentorship process by adding men to the conversation, we realized that there may be a few men out there who'd like to participate as mentors in the program. In that spirit, we're excited to introduce ...
  CUGC Women in Tech User Created Mentoring

Windows Server 2019, Citrix VDA and the Broken, Not-so-Fast Reconnect

By Brandon Mitchell posted 09-23-2019
Windows Server 2019, Citrix VDA and the Broken, Not-so-Fast Reconnect If you’re using Windows Server 2019 with Citrix Virtual Apps, you may have a problem with users reconnecting to disconnected sessions that have idle timed out. I believe the adoption rate of Windows Server 2019 is low, and that's why this issue remains relatively unknown. There is a bug with Windows Server 2019 and Citrix Virtual Apps that remains unresolved even with the September 2019 Cumulative Updates and the 1909 Citrix VDA (latest as of this writing). This bug affects reconnecting to idle timed out ICA sessions only. ICA sessions that are forcibly disconnected by the user ...

Content Collaboration, Citrix Files and Azure AD Single Sign On

By Wendy Gay posted 09-19-2019
Citrix Files, Azure AD and Single Sign-On In my last post, I talked about how to ensure access to a VDI in Azure without any re-authentication using Azure AD. Here it is if you missed it:  https://www.mycugc.org/blogs/wendy-gay/2019/07/23/citrix-cloud-citrix-workspace-experience-and-feder. I wanted to follow on from that blog and show you how to access the Citrix Files application on the VDI desktop in Azure via the Citrix Workspace. The Citrix Files application is installed with the VDA now which is great, and I want to ensure that I have it (Citrix Files) sign in with no prompts or pop-ups appearing for any end-user. I want to make the user experience is ...

CTP and CTA Application Now Open!

By Kimberly Ruggero posted 09-10-2019
CTP and CTA Application Now Open! Are you interested in being more involved with other like-minded individuals who are Citrix technologists and are also huge fans & advocates of Citrix? Well, today is your lucky day! We are excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for the CTP and CTA classes of 2020! The application window will remain open until October 31, 2019 . For details on what it takes to be a CTP or a CTA, keep reading. CTP and CTA candidates are voted into the program by the Citrix community team, CTPs and tenured CTAs. There are formal reviews and voting processes based on the candidate’s alignment with the program guidelines. ...

Migrating GPOs to WEM with Virtual Engine Toolkit

By Brandon Mitchell posted 09-08-2019
In the past, I’ve spent countless hours trying to translate ADMX/ADML files into corresponding registry settings. So it’s welcome that Citrix WEM Service and WEM v1909 on-premises introduce the ability to migrate GPO settings to WEM. You can read about it here Support for migrating Group Policy Objects (GPOs) from the Citrix docs and here Migrating GPO settings to WEM from James Kindon’s blog. Being able to migrate GPOs to WEM is a step in the right direction, but falls a little short for admins that don’t have access to administer GPOs. One of the use-cases for using WEM is for administrators that don’t have rights to author GPOs. For those that have administrator ...
  User Created GPO WEM

CUGC Women in Technology–2020 Mentorship Program Applications Open!

By Jo Harder posted 09-04-2019
CUGC Women in Technology–2020 Mentorship Program Applications Open! Hey Ladies … Does Your Career Need a Little Boost? Enabling women, one at a time, to gain confidence and achieve goals is the focus of the CUGC Women In Technology mentoring program. The 2019-2020 program is getting ready to start, and let us tell you about the program and the commitment.  Back in the days when the Citrix Technology Program (CTP) added its first female CTPs, Theresa Miller , Esther Barthel , and Jo Harder explored ways that women could expand beyond a single-digit percentage. Those discussions led to the creation of the CUGC WIT Mentorship Program . The ...

Microsoft FSLogix Profile Containers and Folder Redirection: Should I? It Depends.

By Brandon Mitchell posted 08-20-2019
Microsoft FSLogix Profile Containers and Folder Redirection: Should I? It depends.   Before FSLogix Profile Containers use of any other roaming profile solution, it has also been recommended to use them in combination with Folder Redirection to help reduce the profile load time. With Profile Containers, profile load time is nearly eliminated by live mounting the Profile Container. So is Folder Redirection still necessary? With Folder Redirection, user documents are accessed at the file-level over the network from the user's redirected documents folder. Without proper considerations, Folder Redirection can harm user experience and performance of the backend ...

Bay Area CUGC Event Recap–Q2 2019

By Donald Wong posted 08-16-2019
​For the second year in row, a Bay Area CUGC meetup was held on my birthday. Now, I believe it's intentional and the organizers wanted to celebrate such a glorious day by inviting everyone to my party. Ok, all kidding aside, the pure coincidence of the event date sure made it challenging. However, I was able to clear out any prior commitments to attend the event. The venue was at Sino, an upscale and modern restaurant located in a popular area, Santa Row, in the heart of San Jose. After a quick sign-in and brief meet-and-greet, Joshua Espinosa, an SE from Citrix, took the floor to give everyone a rundown on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and the key announcements ...

Citrix Cloud, Citrix Workspace Experience and Federated Authentication Service with Azure AD

By Wendy Gay posted 07-23-2019
Citrix Cloud, Citrix Workspace Experience and Federated Authentication Service with Azure AD This is a feature that I have been waiting to test and play with for a while now, and it has arrived in private tech preview. It allows users of the Citrix Workspace Experience, using Federated Authentication Service, access to Citrix VDA resources with Azure Azure AD credentials. Federated Authentication Service (FAS) has been available since 7.9 and has been integrated with on-premises Citrix ADC and Citrix Storefront for SAML authentication since then.  Let's take a look at the use cases for Federated Authentication Service. This service allows contractors, ...

Northeast CUGC XL: Second Edition

By Nicolas Ignoto posted 07-22-2019
Recap of the second Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) XL event in New York City. Hosted at the Microsoft Technology Center on June 25, 2019. Check out the recap video here!   Northeast CUGC XL: Second Edition The second annual Northeast CUGC XL was held at the end of June in New York City. This all-day, free event was hosted at Microsoft Technology Center in Midtown and was co-organized by the New York Metro, New Jersey and Connecticut/RI CUGC local groups. We were excited to once again bring together IT professionals from many different locations. The XL events are usually the biggest of the year for local CUGC groups, and this time ...

Raleigh-Durham Citrix User Group Event Recap - July 18, 2019

By Alain Assaf posted 07-22-2019
Raleigh-Durham Citrix User Group Event Recap - July 18, 2019 On July 18th, 2019, the Raleigh-Durham CUGC meeting took place at the Citrix Offices in downtown Raleigh. The Citrix building is located in the warehouse district and is a former steel warehouse. Original pulleys and I-Beams are still present and were used to move massive steel beams to trains and trucks years ago, but now provide a reminder of older industry in the midst of high-tech innovation and cloud computing. We had a nice turnout with partners, vendors, Citrix representatives, and numerous CUGC members. CUGC leaders  Patrick Fish  (@Patrick Fish) and  Alain Assaf  ( @Alain Assaf ...

#CUGC500: Everything Smells Like Smoke And I'm Happy As Can Be!

By DJ Eshelman posted 07-03-2019
#CUGC500: Everything Smells Like Smoke and I’m Happy As Can Be Memories from the 500th CUGC meeting in Nashville, June 20th 2019 I have never had a CUGC meeting where I had to quite literally shower to get the smell of smoke off of me. My Citrix bag from Synergy, my laptop, clothes… they all smell of smoke now. And I couldn’t be happier about that. The 500th CUGC Meeting was held on June 20th, 2019 in Nashville, TN, USA – at one of our local legends – Martin’s BBQ. For me, it was more than a little special. Because, I may not have been at the first CUGC meeting– but I definitely wanted to be first.  The 500th CUGC Meeting is a Kind of a Big Deal  ...

Citrix Synergy 2019 Recap

By Carl Behrent posted 06-27-2019
Well, another Citrix Synergy is done for the year and as always, they are a really good event full of great content and great networking. The keynote packed in a lot of announcements: New Intelligent Workspace update that includes machine learning, automation and micro-app capability Micro-app integration out of the box with business applications like: Salesforce SAP Microsoft Outlook ServiceNow etc., etc. Citrix integration with Google Cloud Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops support on VMware Cloud (seems Citrix have all major clouds covered now) It was great to see what the vendors were showcasing. Citrix had some great ...

What a Fantastic Synergy 2019 (and Match.Geek)!

By Rasmus Raun-Nielsen posted 06-09-2019
Besides a lot of great information on the vision, strategy and technical improvements from Citrix, this Synergy brought some more personal experiences for yours truly. Not only did I get to meet a lot of the CUGC community members, but I also got the chance to meet the people behind CUGC and thank them for their great work (and I got to host my first Match.Geek-session! YAAAY!) As you may have read in my previous blog here , I have had the pleasure of attending the Match.Geek-sessions at previous Synergy conferences - This year, however, was going to be a bit different for me…   On the day of the session, the actual amount of attendees was between ...