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Posts Tagged ‘EnvokeIT’

GPO and PowerShell support in #AzureAD and #Intune? Tech Preview released – #EnvokeIT Workspace Client

February 9, 2017 Leave a comment

Finally… we’re pleased to announce that we now have released the Tech Preview of the EnvokeIT Workspace Client service!! 🙂

What is this and why did we build this SaaS device configuration service?

Have you also tried to roll-out Windows 10 with Azure AD and potentially also Microsoft Intune and lack capabilities like Group Polices to control registry and files or to run PowerShell scripts?

We’ve solved that for you! The EnvokeIT Workspace Client is a device configuration client built on the cloud and for the cloud! Now you have all the capabilities that you require to deliver a modern Windows 10 Out-of-the-box delivery using Azure AD!

Have a look at our “quick” overview video or just sign up for a free Tech Preview tenant and you’ll be up and running within minutes!

The service is built for Windows on Azure and leverages the latest technology to ensure that you can adopt the Windows and Azure AD architecture without lacking what you need from good old Group Policies!

Here are some examples of what the service can solve for you:

  • You want to remove the Windows “bloatware” for all your Windows 10 devices, no problem
  • If you want to specify and ensure that all your users have the same company background, you can do that!
  • If you need to configure application settings for all users, no problem!
  • Do you need to have an updated User Guides or other material easily pushed to your users desktop, no problem!
  • If your web applications require that they are put in Local Intranet or Trusted Sites in your browsers, then you can push that out!
  • Does your Windows application require specific local settings files to be pushed to the clients, no worries we’ve got you covered there as well!
  • Do you need to push out Microsoft Edge policies you can do that as well! For a complete list of built-in Group Policy objects that you can configure see this list.
  • If you need to do special configuration of the OS, applications or user settings you can do that through PowerShell scripts, you write the scripts and our agent makes sure it’s run in user or system context. Configuration possibilities are endless with PowerShell script support!

Read more at the site or sign up for your own trial tenant!

https://cloudclientportal.envokeit.com

http://www.envokeit.com/en/project/envokeit-workspace-client/

And if you need any assistance in your Windows 10, Office 365 or Enterprise Mobility Project just contact us at EnvokeIT: info@envokeit.com or send an email to me directly: richard.egenas at envokeit.com

//Richard

Categories: Azure, Intune, Microsoft, Mobility, Office 365, Office365 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

#Citrix #XenApp 7.8 & #XenDesktop 7.8 Available for Download – #EnvokeIT

February 25, 2016 Leave a comment

Citrix has no released XenApp & XenDesktop 7.8 for download! If you wonder how this new release could help you then contact us at EnvokeIT for more information!

Customers with active Software Maintenance (SWM) or Subscription Advantage (SA)–effective February 17, 2016–can download XenApp 7.8 and XenDesktop 7.8 on Citrix.com.

The XenApp and XenDesktop 7.8 release greatly simplifies application management, delivering a 90% time savings over traditional methods. It enhances the user experience, while introducing scalability improvements, enabling a 40% memory reduction and a 20% increase in CPU efficiency for select behavior. Plus new features strengthen security and compliance.

Simplify app management and delivery through new AppDisk technology

The 7.8 release includes exciting, new AppDisk app layering technology that lets you package and manage applications independent of your master desktop or server image. AppDisk alleviates the management complexity of multiple, departmental-based images by instantly layering applications onto your golden image based on different employee needs, making it easier than ever to deliver, install or update an application without changing or impacting the pristine, master image.

Save 90 percent of testing time by integrating AppDNA compatibility testing with AppDisk

Extending the app layering benefits of AppDisk, AppDNA for AppDisk instantly assesses the compatibility of the AppDisk applications with the associated master image, provides step-by-step remediation guidance to make any app compatible, while also reordering multiple assigned AppDisk layers for peak performance. Now you will be able to validate and remediate any OS or inter-app compatibility issues before delivering AppDisk applications to your user community.

Read more…

Categories: All, Citrix, XenApp, XenDesktop Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft acquires Xamarin! – #Microsoft, #Xamarin, #Mobility, #EnvokeIT

February 25, 2016 Leave a comment

This is really cool and something that I personally love! Great move by Microsoft!! 🙂

Microsoft-Xamarin

If you have any questions about this acquisition or if you need assistance with your mobile app development contact us at EnvokeIT!

Microsoft to acquire Xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device

As the role of mobile devices in people’s lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer opportunity and innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.

As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.

In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.

Continue reading here!

//Richard

Categories: All, Microsoft, Mobility Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

#Citrix Linux Virtual Desktop 1.1 released! – #Linux, #DaaS, #EnvokeIT, #XenDesktop

October 13, 2015 Leave a comment

Citrix has now released version 1.1 of the Linux VDA as a part of XenDesktop 7.6 Feature Pack 3! 🙂

These are the new features of tis release:

  • Linux VDI dedicated desktops enabled in XenApp, XenDesktop 7.6 infrastructure
  • Multi-monitor support with Linux virtual desktop at maximum total resolution of 8192×8192
  • Support for RHEL 7 and SLE 12.
  • Addition of Centrify for domain join along with existing Winbind and Quest support
  • KDE window manager and enabling QT based applications support on Linux Virtual Desktop
  • Internationalization support for non-English environments

Click here to download!

For more information the please see my previous blog post on this great Linux Hosted Desktop Experience!

Richard_happy_when_Microsoft_and_Citrix_Loves_Linux

//Richard

Categories: All, Citrix, Linux, XenDesktop Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft and AzureCon delivers! Love it! – #Azure, #AzureCon, #EnvokeIT, #IoT, #SaaS, #PaaS

October 4, 2015 Leave a comment

I really love the way that Microsoft and Azure delivers! It’s so amazing with all the PaaS and SaaS offerings they now have on top of the traditional IaaS delivery. There is no other cloud provider out there that delivers anything near it! I’m amazed and so happy to be a part of this journey!

If you didn’t have the time to look at AzureCon you have a lot of great videos and topics to go through!!

Here is a short overview of the many great things released and presented:

  • General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
  • Announcing new N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities
  • Announcing Azure IoT Suite available to purchase
  • Announcing Azure Container Service
  • Announcing Azure Security Center

Watching the Videos

All of the talks presented at AzureCon (including the 60 breakout talks) are now available to watch online.  You can browse and watch all of the sessions here.

Announcing General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India

Yesterday we announced the general availability of our new India regions: Mumbai (West), Chennai (South) and Pune (Central).  They are now available for you to deploy solutions into.

This brings our worldwide presence of Azure regions up to 24 regions, more than AWS and Google combined. Over 125 customers and partners have been participating in the private preview of our new India regions.   We are seeing tremendous interest from industry sectors like Public Sector, Banking Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare whose cloud adoption has been restricted by data residency requirements.  You can all now deploy your solutions too.

Announcing N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU Support

This week we announced our new N-series family of Azure Virtual Machines that enable GPU capabilities.  Featuring NVidia’s best of breed Tesla GPUs, these Virtual Machines will help you run a variety of workloads ranging from remote visualization to machine learning to analytics.

The N-series VMs feature NVidia’s flagship GPU, the K80 which is well supported by NVidia’s CUDA development community. N-series will also have VM configurations featuring the latest M60 which was recently announced by NVidia. With support for M60, Azure becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to bring the capabilities of NVidia’s Quadro High End Graphics Support to the cloud. In addition, N-series combines GPU capabilities with the superfast RDMA interconnect so you can run multi-machine, multi-GPU workloads such as Deep Learning and Skype Translator Training.

Announcing Azure Security Center

This week we announced the new Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources, and helps you stay ahead of threats and attacks.  Azure is the first cloud platform to provide unified security management with capabilities that help you prevent, detect, and respond to threats.

Azure_Security_Center

The Azure Security Center provides a unified view of your security state, so your team and/or your organization’s security specialists can get the information they need to evaluate risk across the workloads they run in the cloud.  Based on customizable policy, the service can provide recommendations. For example, the policy might be that all web applications should be protected by a web application firewall. If so, the Azure Security Center will automatically detect when web apps you host in Azure don’t have a web application firewall configured, and provide a quick and direct workflow to get a firewall from one of our partners deployed and configured: Read more…

Categories: Active Directory (AD), All, Azure, Azure Stack, BYOD, Client Services, Cloud, Collaboration, Development, Enterprise Architecture, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Mobility, Networking, Security Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Citrix Lifecycle Management cloud service – is it something for you? YES! – #Citrix, #WorkSpaceCloud, #DaaS @EnvokeIT

August 26, 2015 Leave a comment

I must admit that both Microsoft and Citrix are on the right track, it’s amazing to see the number of great “cloud” services that they now are releasing. If you’ve been reading my blog and follow me on Twitter then you know that I’m already a HUGE fan of Azure and all its offerings, and now Citrix comes up with a real interesting cloud based service to simplify the life-cycle management of their offerings, great job!

In this post we’re going to look at little closer to the Citrix Lifecycle Management service. So let’s start of with what it is, have a look at this great overview video:

Citrix Lifecycle Management is a comprehensive cloud-based lifecycle management solution to accelerate and simplify the design, deployment and ongoing management of Citrix workloads and enterprise applications.

Supporting many types of IT workloads across virtual and private or public cloud environments, this solution enables IT organizations to become faster, more cost-effective and more agile, and it helps maintain service quality and high availability with redundancy, automatic scaling and disaster recovery of applications. Built on blueprints incorporating validated reference architectures, configurations and best practices, Citrix Lifecycle Management provides a unified and standardized set of management tools for rapid and best practice-driven design, deployment and management of Citrix workloads and enterprise applications.

See this blog for a further explanation of Citrix Lifecycle Management.

Citrix Lifecycle Management is delivered as a cloud-based service through the newly launched Citrix Workspace Cloud.

The cloud service interacts with many types of supported Resource Locations that can be located either up in a public cloud service like Azure (that rocks!) or your on premise location and leveraging any of these technologies:

Citrix-lifecycle-Management-Resource-locations-support

Once that you’ve connected the service to one of your Resource Locations then you can really start to look at the process of deploying your services to it, here is a good overview of the process of deploying a blueprint:

Citrix-Lifecycle-Management-process-deploy-blueprint

As you can see the process is really straight forward, 1 connect to your Resource Location, 2 Add your blueprint and then as the 3rd step you Deploy it! Read more…

Categories: All, Azure, Citrix, Client Services, Cloud, Device Management, Mobility, ShareFile, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Finally – Citrix Workspace Cloud is GA! – #Citrix, #WorkSpaceCloud, #DaaS, #SaaS, @EnvokeIT

August 21, 2015 Leave a comment

This is something that we at EnvokeIT have been trying out for quite a while and really enjoy, it’s a great service that will simplify a lot for many service providers and customers. Contact us at EnvokeIT if you have any questions or if you need assistance on your journey to the cloud!

Workspace-Cloud-Launch-300x183

Now your business can take advantage of Citrix Workspace Cloud, the fastest and easiest way for IT to enable business productivity with secure apps, data, device management and more.

I’m pleased to announce the general availability of Citrix Workspace Cloud, the industry’s simplest way to build and deliver a complete workspace without compromise.

Now, you can easily combine virtual apps and desktops, mobile apps and device policies and data – securely delivered from any cloud or infrastructure you choose – whether on-premises, off-premises or both in a hybrid model.

Workspace Cloud is Revolutionary

Over the past 18 months, the team has been busy engaging with customers, partners, industry analysts, media, Citrix Technology Professionals, ISVs and alliance partners around the world as we built Workspace Cloud.

The general reaction has been consistent: Workspace Cloud is unlike anything else and comprehensively addresses the biggest challenges in workspace management.

The cloud-based management and control plane accelerates deployments. The choice of infrastructure locations provides the flexibility partners and customer’s demand, and the comprehensive set of workspace services that are always up to date ensure you can meet the broad set of IT use cases.

A single unified, global, and multi-tenant SaaS platform to create complete workspaces

People do their best work when they have immediate access to their work resources – the people, apps, and files they need at any specific moment or context.

While other vendors offer a ‘workspace’ that is nothing more than virtual desktops offered in their own cloud, Workspace Cloud makes it easy to deliver a people-centric, modern workspace located on-premises, off-premises or both in a hybrid model.

Easily compose workspaces containing apps, desktops, mobile and data. Workspace management allows you to use existing corporate Active Directory domains to add, remove or change the resources from one place once and on-demand – everyone and every resource in the workspace is updated.

Stay in control and retain choice for your infrastructure and cloud selections

Want to run your contractor applications out of Amazon, your productivity apps in Azure to be near their Office 365 data, and desktops on-premises? No problem. Workspace Cloud provides the only solution that allows you to select the best infrastructure combinations based on economics, performance, existing capacity, sovereignty, and expertise. This means the selection can be made on a per-service basis. This choice extends not only to your applications and desktops, but also to your data.

Workspace Cloud accelerates deployment and management through a SaaS-based control plane and securely communicates with your infrastructure through a simple cloud connector. Driven by a simple stateless, zero-touch management architecture. After a simple installation the connector is ready to provision resources, enumerate users from Microsoft Active Directory domains, and launch session requests.

Comprehensive portfolio of workspace services available as a subscription

Workspace Cloud subscriptions contains services that address the core use cases customers face every day and are available today. Start with one offering but easily add more based upon your expanding business needs.

The core services we’re announcing today include:

  • Applications and Desktops Service – Deliver secure virtual apps and desktops to any device, and leave the product installation, setup, configuration, upgrades and monitoring to Citrix based on industry-leading XenApp and XenDesktop technology.
  • Mobility Service – Provide cloud-based, comprehensive enterprise mobility management (EMM) — including mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management, and enterprise-grade productivity apps — for a secure user experience on BYOD or corporate devices based on XenMobile technology.
  • Secure Document Service – Meet the mobility and collaboration needs of employees and the data security requirements of the enterprise with this secure enterprise file sync and sharing service based on ShareFile technology.
  • Lifecycle Management Service – Accelerate and automate the design, deployment, and ongoing management of Citrix enterprise workloads with comprehensive lifecycle management. The service provides standardized, repeatable automation technology with a catalog of blueprints – assembled scripts that capture configurations, settings and other complex details into a single repeatable solution. Read more about this new technology here.

Continue reading more here!

//Richard

Categories: All, BYOD, Citrix, Cloud, EnvokeIT, XenApp, XenDesktop Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

FINALLY!! Nutanix Community Edition (CE) is here and it’s FREE!! – #Nutanix, #EnvokeIT, #Virtualization via (@andreleibovici

June 11, 2015 Leave a comment

This is so cool! I know that a lot of people out there has beeen waiting for this, including myself! 😉

Nutanix CE is a great way to get you started with Nutanix in your own lab environment; and it is now available to everyone now. CE is a fully working Acropolis + Prism stack that enables you to not only host your virtual machines, but enjoy all the benefits of Nutanix. The features available with CE are the exact same enjoyed by paying customers, being the difference that it is a community supported edition and there is a maximum limit of 4 nodes.

Some of the features available with CE are:

  • De-duplication
  • Compression
  • Erasure Coding
  • Asynchronous DR
  • Shadow Cloning
  • Single server (RF=1), three servers (RF=2) or four servers (RF=2)
  • Acropolis Hypervisor (all VM operations, high availability etc.)
  • Analytics
  • Full API framework for development, orchestration and automation
  • Self-Healing
  • ToR integration

Metro Availability, Synchronous Replication, Cloud Connect and Prism Central as not part of Nutanix CE.

Since you will be providing the hardware there are some minimum requirements:

Screen Shot 2015-06-06 at 8.47.23 AM

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nutanix CE extends the Nutanix commitment to fostering an open, transparent and community-centric approach to innovative solutions for mainstream enterprises. Nutanix CE enables a complete hyperconverged infrastructure deployment in just 60 minutes or less on your own hardware and without virtualization or software licensing.

To get started access “Getting Started with Nutanix Community Edition”, create an account and you will be able to register for download. The first…

As usual your more than welcome to contact me at richard at envokeit.com or contact us at EnvokeIT if you want to know more about Nutanix!

Continue reading here!

//Richard

Categories: All, Infrastructure, Nutanix Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

See how Citrix XenDesktop for Linux looks – #Citrix, #XenDesktop, #Linux, #EnvokeIT, #BYOD, #DaaS

June 4, 2015 1 comment

This is one of the coolest things a part from the Workspace Cloud service that Citrix is working on. I’ve had the pleassure of trying this out and we at EnvokeIT have been doing a lot of tests of this Linux VDA tech preview.

Isn’t it great that both Microsoft and Citrix now seem to love Linux 🙂   (and yes, I manipulated these images so it’s not an official Citrix statement!)Richard_happy_when_Microsoft_and_Citrix_Loves_Linux

So this little blog post is just going to show of the capabilities and how nicely this integrates with the Citrix XenDesktop architecture. First of all I’d like to say thanks to my colleagues Björn Bekkouche and Peter Smali for letting me use their lab environment!

Before we get into showing how it works and looks I must just highlight that if you have any questions about how we can assist you to deliver Linux-based Terminal Servers or VDI’s to remote users in a secure and optimal just contact us at EnvokeIT here or pop me an email: richard at envokeit.com.

This is great for all of you with Developers on Linux! Have them code from anywhere in a secure manner! They can run their Linux VDA in your datacenter, connect to it from an Receiver compliant device and code from them and you have your intellectual property secured internally instead of having them checking out Git repositories to their local devices etc.!

So what is XenDesktop for Linux? Well, to answer that really simple I assume that you have some basic knowledge of the Citrix XenDesktop architecture.. if you don’t then please read up on that a little before continue reading, one really good contribution to bulding your architecture is described in this Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook or this Citrix XenDesktop – Blueprint. These contains a lot of valuable information that you shall think of and how to configure the environment to fulfill you use cases.

But overall think of the XenDesktop architecture of something like the following pictures (click to enlarge them). The first one shows the new model where we could run and take care of the VDA’s ourselves on-premise but leverage the Workspace Cloud service from Citrix so that we don’t anymore have to bother about the XenDesktop infrastructure components and the life-cycle management etc. of those. The second one is the more overall traditional architecture overview that you’d see of the different layers.

Apps-Service-Overview

XenDesktop_overview_architecture

And as you see above this details the standard architecture wher you would have your Server or Desktop VDA’s in the resource layer hosting the desktops for your users to connect to, but they have all been Windows-based up until now!

Now with the Tech Preview we can actually install the Linux-based VDA on a Red Hat or Suse machine and access that through the SAME Delivery Controllers and StoreFront stores that also manage our Windows-based VDA’s.

And this is awesome! 🙂 We can leverage the already existing Windows-based architecture to just “hook in” our Linux-desktops as well and get users to conect through Receiver for Web, Receiver and even through the NetScalers if you need (works like a charm!!).

So as you can see here we have a nice little landing page for our entry points that are running different versions and access different environments etc.

EnvokeIT_Access_Portal

So we have Peters entry point running one NetScaler version and theme: Read more…

Categories: BYOD, Citrix, NetScaler, XenDesktop Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft Specialist – Architecting Microsoft Azure Cloud Solutions – #Azure, #LoveAzure, #EnvokeIT

May 29, 2015 Leave a comment

Yes, I found a really interesting exam and must say that this is a great one! Makes you show that you understand all the great services that Azure has to offer and on such a good level as well!

I’m happy I made it and that EnvokeIT continues its journey within the Microsoft Cloud and Mobility area! 🙂

Spec_Arch_AzureSol_logo_BW

The things that I love is the way that Microsoft puts a lot of really good material out there for free for all us techies to consume, like the Microsoft Virtual Academy, Channel 9, Azure Friday, etc.

Also what is really good if you’re preparing for this exam (70-534) is to go through this great prep guide:

Early Experts Study Guide for Microsoft Specialist Certification Exam 70-534, Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions

So go and explore everything that Azure has to offer and if you have any thoughts or questions around Azure don’t hesitate to contact me at richard at envokeit.com or through our official contact details for the UK and Swedish businesses here.

Have a great weekend!

//Richard

Categories: All, Azure, Azure Stack, Cloud, Infrastructure, Microsoft Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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