After the successful trip up north to Belfast last year for the Irish Citrix User Group it was decided that it would be worthwhile to keep it on the circuit and head north once again.

We had a great turn out with a mix of partners Citrix employees and customers traveling from Sweden Scotland and UK with the usual contingent making the trip up from Dublin.

Just to freshen things up we changed venue to the Europa Hotel one of Belfast’s most iconic buildings, and it did not disappoint, the room was spot on bar a few TV laptop connectivity issues but what user meeting doesn’t. Food and drinks reception after was on point with some great burgers and excellent conversations had about the topic presented through the afternoon.

As you see from the Agenda slide we had Nutanix sponsor the event a company who I had worked closely with for a number of years and the synergy between the two companies is just growing stronger year by year.

Indeed Citrix CTP David Brett delivered an excellent presentation on how to best to deliver your Citrix workloads on Nutanix AHV or in Azure EC2 instances all the while allowing the end user the ability to seamlessly manage both within the Nutanix management consoles.

First up from the Citrix team Paul Murray who made the trip in true planes trains and automobiles style from Sweden to deliver “The Story Behind the Marketing Vision” of what “Destination Hybrid” really means delving the Citrix vision from a technical point of view. Showing that we have the flexibility to run our workloads on any cloud and on prem data Centre and indeed manage those workloads from any location, with some interesting insights and hints for the future. Then using Workspace and identity to gain access to all your company resources and data from traditional VDI workloads, to SAS applications all from accessed using one identity from a single access porthole i.e. the Workspace App.

As this is the Citrix user group it’s always great to have the support of Wendy and her team of expert technologists although them may have gone through a name change recently as did Citrix they are still the same great bunch of techs who always have some great tech content on the day for us and this was no different. With a slight format change we managed to get three topics for the price of one, and each topic went down well with some customers going back to investigate further after realizing they are already paying for this feature.

First up Wendy Gay giving us a run through the VDA upgrade service, if there was one thing missing after pushing up all the management and upgrade of your Citrix control plane to the cloud it was having to manage the upgrade process of all the VDA app servers in your control. Citrix have now delivered this service to give you a few choices on when it happens, when these have been identified the service will take care if the rest.

Antoin who has recently moved to Wendy’s team gave us a run through of ITSM which after hearing seems like a no brainer if you are running service now in a large organization. Indeed this was one of the topics one of the customers was off to investigate. It just makes sense if you can create a support ticket to reset your session and through automation it just happens, rather than waiting for it to go through the entire process till you get to an IT support engineers to do it for you.

Gavin Strong was up next delving deep into session recording and how it’s much easier to setup now that most of it’s components are running as a service, not the many servers you needed on prem. The other interesting side of this and seems to be where it’s at its most powerful is how it can tie in with the behavioural analytics. Using the analytics engine to make informed decisions when to start recording a session due to a difference in behaviour and having the ability to block a user or get them to re authenticate depending on action all the while recording what is happening, so that the incident can be fully investigated in the future. This seems a must for the highly regulated finical services industry.

Closing out the event we had another CTP James Rankin delivering the future of profiles and we all learned that Citrix UPM is defiantly back in the mix if you are designing a new Citrix solution, especially if you are using a lot of published apps. James highlighted some of the recent work he has done where UPM has out shone its competitors and is well worth a look again. He has also been working with product management to deliver new features to address some of the issues he is seeing in the field.

Finishing off the evening with quiet drink in one of Belfast’s rooftop bars, discussing the afternoons event.

Keep an eye out on mycugc for our next event and of course all the other excellent events put on globally and also online. Download Slides here thanks RonnieDOTie