We just had our summer event in Dublin in the Sky suite of the Radison Gloden lane. It was one of our best to date with almost 40 attending to here from our super  panel of speakers including Citrix CTP’s a Senior Escalation engineer for Skyp4B company CEO and our sponsors Igel.

 

First up we had Christian Binkhoff who had just announced the past weekend in Amsterdam at E2eVC that he had joined fxlogix. He ran through the ins and outs of Citrix cloud and Azure with some very interesting cheat sheets he has put together over him many implementations.

He talked gave a detailed overview of Availability Zones and how to make best use of your resources, and had a handy sizing chart to help you better understand what you actually need for various workloads. Also detailing how to save costs which is the all important bit when moving to any cloud provider.

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We they did a little switch around as Tim’s plane was delayed from London so Kevin Goodman CEO of fxlogic stepped in to give us very informative community presentation. With all the Office 365 and outlook cache issues of moving your data further away from the local hard drive it thins it’s looking at.  Many in the industry are turning to mounted VHD techniques to solve this issue with various third party vendors and the tools available for you to write your own.

Kevin gives a deep dive on how the technology really works, how to do it your self or if that’s out of the question hoe to really evaluate the vendors out there and make sure they will work for your particular use case.

 

Tim Mangan had arrived at this time gave us his views on Microsofts new WMSIX format and if it would replace MSI or AppV any time soon. I would not be holding off rolling out your AppV packages any time soon and waiting for WMSIX.  The tooling will inevitably be available to convert when the technology finally arrives but could be up to 5 years before we are truly seeing it in the enterprise.

Tim has also written a book recently which he kindly had a raffle at the end and signed it for one lucky attendee.

 

Then we got a deep dive o trouble shooting Skype4B form one of Citrix’s top escalation engineers Cormac Long. This guy really knows his stuff and walked us through how they get to the bottom of some complex issues. The volumes of users using this technology on a daily basis is very impressive. I’m looking forward to the next time as we are just waiting to see which topic the escalation team will come up with us for next time.

 

Next up our sponsors Igel’s Jack giving a very detailed overview of some of the settings that can be configured from the UMS console. One of the most interactive sessions of the day with lots of questions coming from the group.

The most impressive bit was his very live demo of booting from a UD Pocket thin client picking up the WiFi , entering the address of a cloud management server and the client being securely configured over the internet. Which gave him his secure Citrix desktop.

Last on the bill was Marius (AKA The Viking) and one of the sessions I was really looking forward to as I had been doing some work round Citrix Aloud Azure and using the O365 MFA to connect to Published applications.  Marius takes this to the next level showing how you would join a W10 machine to Azure AD provision all your apps and enable SSO to your Citrix estate via the Azure Apps page. Pretty need stuff which I’m going to try and dive a bit deeper into myself when I get the chance.

We then had the final draw of an Echo Speaker from our sponsors Igel which one lucky attendee took away with him.

We then retired next door to the bar of the sky suite for some nibbles and a few beers to continue the conversations with a room full of extremely talented people to lean on and ask questions over a beer.

 

So we are already planning our next event, September the 27th is the working date at the moment so watch this space and hope some more of you can join us next time.