Citrix has released the videos recorded at the sessions from Citrix Synergy 2010 in San Francisco. I must say i was very impressed with the few videos i have had the time to see so far, very professional editing, a pleasure to see, almost as well as being there, and really a good alternative to attending more than one session at a time

All the sessions can be found here: http://www.citrix.com/tv/#channels/Synergy+2010

Categorized here:

·         Desktop Virtualization
·         Datacenter and Cloud
·         IT Business and Strategy

To those who did not get into the session Jacob and I did on “supporting Macs and iPhones in a corporate infrastructure” or did not go to Synergy it can be found here: http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/2284

René Vester

It is ofcourse all under NDA, but i think i wont get shot if i just say that there is a lot of cool stuff under way, some which most likely will be announced this wednesday/thursday at Synergy keynotes, and some may be for Synergy in Berlin later this year.

So today for me it is Citrix Summit time, the Citrix Partner event and that is also under NDA, luckily though this afternoon kicks off Citrix GeekSpeak. First with a couple of Citrix GeekSpeak Live! sessions and then follow up sessions in the Expo hall in a more relaxed form, Citrix GeekSpeak Easy.

i wrote more about GeekSpeak here.

You can see more about the GeekSpeak this year here: http://www.citrixsynergy.com/agenda/geekspeaklive.html

/René Vester

One cool thing i want to bring to your attention is the fact that GeekSpeak is heavily available with this years Citrix Synergy. I like GeekSpeak and the format of being unfiltered sessions delivered by the most passionate to anyone who will listen.

GeekSpeak is available in 3 shapes this time:

• Geek Speak Tonight: The fan favorite that we ran at Synergy 09 returns, where a combination of Citrix Technology Professionals (CTPs) and CTOs lead discussions and debates on pre-determined topics, and the audience takes center stage and joins the conversation! This event will kick off Synergy on Tuesday, May 11 at 4:30 – 6:45 p.m., giving you a chance to begin the conference with a breath of fresh, unfiltered air. Refreshments will be served. Get there early to claim your seat!

• Geek Speak Track: Not your typical formal breakouts! These sessions are complete with open, unfiltered discussion on a variety of technical topics led by CTPs, Citrix CTOs, and other respected industry thought leaders. Held May 12-14 alongside the formal breakout sessions.

• Geek Speakeasy: Geek Speak Live! comes to the Solutions Expo Hall with a relaxed lounge format for conversational sessions, and a lab format for "bring your own laptop" sessions with industry leaders and technical experts from the community. So grab a snack and head over to the Geek Speakeasy for an action-packed set of sessions from May 11-13!

And the invitation was laid out by Laura Whalen like this:

Are you:

• Tired of dark, stuffy conference rooms where you can hear a pin drop?
• Interested in desktop virtualization, client hypervisors & cloud computing?
• Looking for uncut, unfiltered, and unprecedented discussion and debate?

Do you:

• Want to speak your technically focused mind, and all you need is a stage?
• Enjoy mixing it up with master discussionists of the IT universe?
• Write you name in binary code for fun & watch "The Matrix" for the 5th+ time, just because it’s on?

Time for GeekSpeak?

I for one will be there as much as i can.. its usually great, so if you are at Synergy og Summit, do go join the GeekSpeak sessions

For more information have a look at Laura Whalens blogpost here: http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=141099044

Rene Vester

The finalists are:

I will not make myself judge on who diserves it the most, but i have to say it is one of the best finals i have seen, most in very different areas. I cant wait to see the winner revealed … and i do hope we get an award home to Denmark

You can read more about the finalists on Vicky’s blog here: http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/vickyp

/René Vester

This time however i have the pleasure of presenting, and i am very much looking forward to that. We are just now finishing up on second presentation draft, and i think it is going to be, like Tony would say, Greeeeeeeaat!

I have the pleasure of Co-presenting with a good friend Jacob Berg in a session about Macs and iPhone in the corporate infrastructure. To me it is a topic which often comes up when discussing future solution architecture. A lot of our users have grown happy with the Apple way of doing things, some starting from the graphical industry, others just falling in love with the iPod ..

Our session will be: SYN321- Supporting Macs and iPhones in your corporate infrastructure

Session Description:
Mac computers and iPhones are getting more and more popular among the users of corporate IT infrastructure. BYOC concepts are introducing more Mac’s into "no-Mac" companies. With the introduction of more operating system platforms, IT organizations face new challenges to handle these non-Windows user devices. In this session we will layout the options with live demonstrations of Mac/Citrix use cases to show how this new type of user device can be incorporated into existing or planned Citrix infrastructure.
In this session you will learn:
• How Citrix technologies complement the Mac and the iPhone
• How to get the most out of Citrix on Mac/iPhone
• Best practices on how to implement Citrix solutions on Mac

So.. that is going to be fun i think, and hopefully you will join us

Aside from that i have been given the great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on cloud at the GeekSpeak Tonight! event more info here: GeekSpeak Tonight! for me the GeekSpeak atmosphere is always a blast, unfiltered discussions.. its what we all need

And last but not least i have the pleasure of presenting in the Expo-Area in the GeekSpeak Easy lounge with Alexander Ervik a good friend and fellow CTP from norway. We will take you through “The essentials to a virtual datacenter”, but more on that when you get to San Francisco

Hope to see you there!

/René

After having visited the Norwegian User group on their spring event from Oslo to Kiel, then visiting Las Vegas for the Citrix Partner Summit and the Citrix Synergy event which i have blogged about earlier i we held the 2009 Pubforum Dublin just earlier this month. It was a great event, sadly my duties during the event kept me from blogging as much from the event has i have done earlier. But i can tell you that the event was great, awesome presenters and as it is with Pubforum wonderful attendees. At Pubforum everyone is a family.. presenter and attendee alike, it is one of the great things and i am happy to be a part of the event. Next Pubforum will be in Frankfurt Germany the home city of Pubforum Founder Alex Y..Dr.Conti, so i bet he will do what he can to make us all feel like we were at home

Now i am back to attending my day-job, and at last i have worked my way through the work which had piled up on my desk. And with the summer coming i hope i will have time to write articles and blog posts about all the many impressions i have gotten over the last couple of months. I will be kicking of today or tomorrow with the first part of a serie i have chosen to call The Essentials of Virtualization.

Back on the Blog.. back on twitter.. its good to be home ……… maybe i should get out more

Rene Vester

GeekSpeak has been a much larger part of this event that it was last Synergy and Summit, i love the format of  GeekSpeak. With the GeekSpeak being more integrated a lot of thought has gone into the planning and organization, Laura Whalen and Rich Crusco and everyone else involved has done a great job. The amount of content delivered by CTO, CTPs and other Community and vendor experts is just impressive.

I did quite a few sessions tuesday, wednesday and thursday and most of them were very valuable, and in general i think the content is great for the people attending this event. As for the nerds or geeks like me who spend quite some time keeping up to date in the market we also get a lot of good content from the communty led GeekSpeak as well as the community led presentations in the virtualization congress like Jerome and Ruben from the Nederland’s who did a presentation of their Virtual Reality Check. Michael Keen did a presentation on his Application Delivery Blueprint, it was the only Networkworld live session i got to see but it seems the integration between Network World live, Virtualization Congress and Synergy has been a good mix.

Thursday morning waaaay too early at 9am, i saw Brian Madden presenting on the real cost of VDI. It was a good session and i pretty much agree, VDI is very rarely a fix-it-all solution, however VDI is truly a great tool in environments with specific needs. The needs Brian sees specifically will be published on his website www.brianmadden.com within the next few days

reviewing the website for the conference i found that a lot of videos are already made available on the site. If you have a few minutes i would encourage you to look through the vidoes available at www.citrixsynergy.com . Citrix did a great job with their new initiative CitrixTV you can see more at http://www.citrix.com/tv/ a lot of cool videos there.

As for the product announcements i will try to finish more detailed posts on those, along with my thoughts on the new features and products.

.. Time to head home, another 40 minutes and i am on the plane back to reality.. for sure Vegas has been an experience, but .. whow… there is a lot to take in, we should most likely experience Las Vegas without having a conference to attend on the side

/Rene Vester

I am here attending the Citrix Partner Summit in Las Vegas. The partner summit is held just before kicking off the Citrix Synergy which will be Tuesday. As this is a Partner only event all information is naturally covered by NDA. So not too much to report, however i think i can say a few things without being … shot..

We have heard a few details about what is being unveiled at the Citrix Synergy starting Tuesday, and i think it is safe to say that we will see a lot of focus on simplicity, using the infrastructure that we have today, to do more, and be more efficient, lowering costs, and of course.. the value of the entire Citrix Delivery Center will become clearer. I have for a long time been seeing Citrix as the vendor with the best position in the market to deliver products adjustable to deliver a dynamic Delivery Center, i am not saying that Citrix is the best product in every aspect, Server Virtualization, VDI etc. But Citrix is uniquely placed in the market with their massive market share in application delivery.

Simplification, doing more with less.. focusing on making it simpler to manage, cheaper to maintain.. these are all focus areas we will be seeing supported by the new features coming out from Citrix at this Synergy.

I will of course be following up and blogging as we go along. And also if you want to keep up, check out http://community.citrix.com/underground/. This is the Synergy Underground site and there is already interviews with Brad Nunn, and Michael Keen. The site is going to be updated as the event progresses, i am not completely sure who uploads the content but i am pretty sure most of it is based around our very own CTP’s

There seems to be a lot of the CTP’s present, i was lucky enough to meet Jason Conger, Shawn Bass and Rick Dehlinger and his lovely wife for dinner. I hope i get a chance to talk to a lot more of the CTP’s to pick their brains on the issues of the world today.

Today the Expo Hall opened and i was happy to see that a good amount of vendors were there and Citrix was showing up with a strong team, i will be looking to find time to go there and check out the vendors and talk to the Citrix-Product guys.

I spoke to Vishal G. today and as several times before we got to talk about the Community verified site and the Citrix ready program. Both programs are great, just need even more community participation in recommending the products, delivering real life experiences. I hope you will all give the sites a look, they are there for us to use, the more we put in, the more we get out.

Time for some sleep

Rene Vester

I do not know if Citrix could tell the future and wanted to support the upcoming President Obama, or whatever their reason was, but as many of you might already .. the webinterface is now black! its been given a great new and updated look and feel, but very few customers actually use blue and black as the corporate colours. So, as part of the new strategy to help the community share what they learn Citrix did a new website called www.pimpmyxenapp.com.

So what is PimpMyXenApp?

PimpMyXenApp.com is really community platform when you can get a glimpse of what others have done with Webinterface, you are able to download the Paint By Numbers Kit so that you yourself can work with your webinterface, or even better have a professional Webdeveloper do magic for your corporate webinterface.

At the site there is also a link to the Webinterface SDK support forum so you share and discuss with other members of the community who are looking to change the webinterface.

And i must say.. Webinterface can be tweak in alot of ways, and one of the most crazy i have seen is from Jason Conger, have a look at this video.

I just wanted to show that the Webinterface can be a lot more than just the black elegant look which is the standard, but it takes a bit of time and effort. Hopefully we will see alot of templates for Webinterface. It would be cool if we could have a template frenzy like it has been seen on opensource blogs like wordpress and what not.

Maybe Citrix will make it even easier to distribute the templates, we will see..

Rene Vester

This is the interface:

Applications are easily searchable and when you find the application you are looking for or add it, then you will have the chance to vote for verifications already made by others or add verifications of your own like this:

The interface gives every administrator or consultant the opportunity to both lookup whether other people have had succes running the application needed on Citrix products. But at the same time invites the community to share their experiences.

I actually think alot of different sites have been trying to support the application compatibility cause, but i think it is a great step from Citrix to deliver a good way for everyone to participate in the validation of applications run on their products.

I for one will try to share my experiences over the next few weeks, and i hope you will all do the same so we can get some trustworthy information into the database. The data we can find in the application compatibility list is no better than the quality we put in.

But in short this seems to be an extension of the Citrix Ready program, which Citrix launched to help their partners validate their products with Citrix products, and show customers that the solutions have been tested together.

Hope you will all give it a look and share your experiences, i think it will help us all with a reference base for applications.

Check it out at: http://community.citrix.com/citrixready

Rene Vester