The IT Melting Pot!

Another good blog post from Citrix:

This week we are happy to announce the release of the XenApp Connector for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (a.k.a. Project Thor), marking the culmination of several months of collaboration between Citrix and Microsoft.

System Center 2012 Configuration Manager helps IT empower people to use the devices and applications they need to be productive, while maintaining corporate compliance and control.  It provides a unified infrastructure for mobile, physical, and virtual environments that allows IT to deliver applications and manage user experiences based on identity, connectivity, and device.

More so than any previous release of Configuration Manager, the 2012 release supports the model of user-centric IT management.  The new focus of Configuration Manager is one of empowering users by putting them at the center of the IT universe; one that supports user self-service, bring-your-own-device initiatives, workforce mobility, and the overall IT consumerization trend.   We are very excited about the power this user-centric model provides and how that model is realized via integration of Configuration Manager and XenApp.

So what does the XenApp Connector do?  Put simply, it extends the reach of admins using Configuration Manager to a much broader range of devices and user locations. Historically, Configuration Manager has been used for management of Windows OS & applications deployed to Windows PCs, Windows laptops, Windows Servers and Windows Phones operating within the traditional IT periphery – in other words Active Directory domain joined machines.

The XenApp Connector and Citrix Receiver extend the reach of Configuration Manager to deliver apps not just to Windows devices but all kinds of office and mobile devices including Linux, iOS, and Android devices; in fact nearly every device on the market today..  The Connector also enables a more flexible and mobile workforce. Users are able to gain access to the applications they need regardless of whether they are in the office, working from home, or on the road.

To deliver this functionality, the XenApp Connector leverages three capabilities introduced with System Center 2012:

• Deployment Types
• User-centric administration, and
• The Application Catalog

Using these capabilities Configuration Manager allows administrators to pick the optimal way to deliver an application to a given user depending on what machine they are using.  Let’s say I’m an application admin and I want to give the Engineering group access to Visio.  When one of the Engineers, let’s call her Ann, is using the PC at their desk I may want to have the application delivered as a MSI and installed locally.  Okay.  Nothing new there.

What if Ann has a meeting and wants to use a kiosk PC in a conference room to review some technical design documents she has created?  I may not want to have the app permanently installed on the shared conference room machine.  With the new user-centric deployment types in System Center 2012 I can deal with this scenario by setting a rule so that the app…

Continue reading here!

//Richard