Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Reviews

We were looking for a way to deliver the desktop to the end-user securely and within a short time. We leverage their cloud-hosted desktop virtualization.

We use Azure Cloud and, in terms of laptops, we give them to our employees but, because of the COVID situation, sometimes they work from home using their personal laptops to connect to the office environment. They use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a medium.

Before we used the solution, when an employee would join our company it would take us between seven and 14 days to completely configure and give them a laptop. Now, within a maximum of one day they get their computer and can start working on that system. It has simplified things for us.

The solution also simplifies our adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. For data protection, we have watermarking enabled and the solution opens in full-screen mode so that end-users cannot toggle between VDA and their desktops. The solution also disables use of the clipboard to copy data from the VDA desktop to an endpoint device. Moreover, there is an option to disable even taking a screenshot of the virtual desktop. All of these features help with data protection.

For compliance, we have our own URL to access our desktop server. We can also create a tenant-based method for deploying the virtual desktop for each project, and we can group them. Also, the communication between the endpoint and the virtual desktop is encrypted end-to-end. All communication is over SSL and TLS connections.

The most valuable feature is the watermark because most of the time our employees connect from a remote location. In case they photograph the DDA or some data, the watermark will show which user did so and from which IP they connected. That makes it more secure.

The solution also provides us with flexibility so that it can be used on any device. We mostly have Mac and Windows machines.

In addition, Citrix uses its ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) protocol and for end-users with less bandwidth, the Citrix connectivity enables them to work.

They need to adapt more quickly to the latest additions to the Microsoft operating system. If Windows 10 comes out with a new version, there are compatibility issues and it takes them a lot of time to release an update.

Also, even though they support Linux, as with Windows, we are not able to use the latest version. They need to bring more simplicity to the Linux Virtual Desktop.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for one year.

We don't have that many users, but the scalability is good. If required, there is no limit on the number of users. Currently, we have about 5,000 users on virtual desktops and about 1,000 are using Citrix.

In terms of support they are lagging. They take a lot of time to respond. Once they connect, they take a lot of time to resolve things, especially when moving things from L1 to L2 and L2 to L3. Their backend people keep on changing and it can be annoying for us. It is not that easy to get support. The support is not that great, although it has improved when compared to a year ago.

Neutral

Once we put it on a Cloud Connector, and if we are using a test cloud, it is very easy to deploy. If you want to deploy the ADC, then it takes some time to consider things, but otherwise deployment of Citrix consists of simple steps.

Because we are deployed in the cloud, it took us some time to configure the ADC. The rest of the components were deployed in a week's time, but the ADC took a lot of time, because there were a lot of compatibility issues. We followed the documentation, but it took some time for us to settle the configuration. The ADC is used to connect Citrix to the end-user system so it is a critical component. Deploying the ADC on the cloud is a complex process.

From the time we entered into an agreement to use Virtual Apps and Desktops, it took about six weeks to eight weeks until we could use it. On our end, there were two or three IT people involved.

The Citrix integrator we used was moderately helpful. They tried to help but they didn't have much experience with a cloud deployment. They were able to do on-prem fast, but GCP took them a lot of time.

Our deployment is in its initial stage so we cannot say there have been cost savings, but in terms of security, it is good. It has also improved the efficiency of our IT department by approximately 20 percent.

The pricing is a little bit high, but it's good value for the product's stability and efficiency.

You need to choose the right licensing, whether it is the Advanced or Premium Edition.

We have used Azure Virtual Desktop and some other solutions as well, but compared to all of them, in terms of the performance, the screen refresh, and security, Citrix is number-one.

Citrix is an enterprise leader for virtual desktops. We cannot compare Citrix options, usability, and simplicity with Azure Virtual Desktop. With Azure Virtual Desktop, there is a lot of slowness and audio will not work. When it comes to an enterprise-grade or first-class option, you need to look at Citrix.

You need to think about ADC. If you are planning a deployment in the cloud, you need to be well aware of what will work and what will not work with ADC. Otherwise, it will be difficult.

The challenges we were looking to deal with by using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops were: How do we protect our data and how do we make sure that our data is not leaked out? We have deployed Citrix for most of our critical applications so that our users are using the Citrix VDI.

We have deployed it for a small number of users, between 1,500 and 2,000. To deploy it, we are using some Cisco hardware that we had available and some of the existing hardware within our data center. We have it on the web right now, but going forward, we are also moving some of their solution to the cloud.

We are using the application virtualization capabilities, on-premise desktop virtualization, cloud-hosted desktop virtualization, remote PC and physical desktop access.

The solution simplifies adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. Overall, from a cyber security point of view, in terms of data leakage as well as patches and upgrades that are required to be deployed to multiple endpoints, Citrix makes it very simple. That clearly helps in terms of mitigating risks at a very early stage.

The security of our intellectual property and data is enhanced because of the roles we have defined very precisely. People only have access to the data they are supposed to have access to.

The most valuable features of Citrix are the remote desktop advantages and the remote desktop environment for our remote users.

When it comes to the security and protection of critical business applications and desktops, it works very well. We were able to achieve what we were looking to do using the Citrix solution. It provides all of the features required for the protection of data. For example, we don't want to allow any copy/paste of data to an outside environment, and we are able to restrict the VDI to not allow any data transfer from the VDI to the local laptop's hard drives. That is one of the greatest advantages the solution provides. We also lock the USB.

We get complete control using the single, cloud control pane of Citrix. Using it, we can control the deployment of VDIs, which helps.

There is room for improvement because it has a lot of dependency on Active Directory and other things. If they could come up with something similar and native, a complete solution portfolio would help.

We have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about one year.

As of now, we don't have any plans to increase our usage. Our consumption has been good during COVID, but we have been able to achieve what was required from our existing licenses.

There were some issues initially, in terms of the requirements, and there were some delays.

We did not have a previous solution.

Once we entered into an agreement to use the service, it took three to four months before we could start using it. The initial setup at our end to use the service took about a month to a month and a half. It was complex to some extent in our scenario, but as we worked on it and did a deep dive, we were able to do what was required for the deployment.

In general, they met our expectations for services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec.

We had our enterprise architect team and the project teams deploying the solution, as well as the respective business people who would be working very closely with their end-users. It was a team of 45 to 50 people. For maintenance, we have administrators as well as people who handle the required setup for the environment and who do troubleshooting.

We had help from a Citrix partner. From a project management standpoint, I would rate them at eight out of 10. The project management resources are not available from Citrix itself. They have to rely on partners and, sometimes, the partners also have to rely on the OEM.

The prices quoted initially were on the very high side, and there was room for negotiations, considering the competition and the options that are available directly from Microsoft now. The Microsoft options were not that mature at the time we were looking for a solution.

We looked at other solutions to some extent, but Citrix had already been in the market for a long time, so we started using Citrix. 

Citrix does not have its own hypervisor and VMware was very close competition. It would have also been a good, equivalent choice and there would not have been a problem using it. Then we looked at the financials and that aspect was left to the procurement department for negotiations. Overall, we gave a slightly higher rating to the VMware product, but senior management said that they would like to go with Citrix.

My advice would be to look at the options available and at your specific requirements. You need to find the best match for the overall integration of your ecosystem in terms of how it is with Office 365. And you may be using multiple SaaS solutions. The product you choose should be able to match all of those requirements.

The biggest lesson is that, during COVID, Citrix has come in handy for us for working remotely. It's a good solution.

The solution provides the flexibility of being used on most devices, but not on every device. It covers 80 to 85 percent of devices. In terms of the user experience, when we asked employees to work on the VDI, they were not entirely happy, considering the performance compared with a normal laptop or a desktop. But overall, the user experience is good, an eight or 8.5 out of 10.

The solution has enabled us, as an organization, to embrace thin-client computing, but I wouldn't say we have seen savings as a result. Citrix cannot function alone for organizations that have Office 365 deployed. Office 365 forces you to pay for a lot of other solutions and services that Citrix also has to rely on.

We deliver mainly desktops to all of our offices, using thin clients. Since we've been working from home during the pandemic, people just use their home computers to access their desktops. We deploy a desktop full of a standard set of applications, and we have a few published applications that are not on a desktop. People access those from that desktop, and some people access them as a published application and not a desktop.

We have people who have laptops and some of them just use one or two applications, so they don't get a full desktop. They'll just VPN from their laptop and use Citrix to access those few applications.

The following represent how Citrix technology is leveraged in our organization: application virtualization capabilities, on-premise desktop virtualization, and Remote PC access or remote access to physical desktops. We don't do the latter a lot, but we do publish remote desktop as a published application. Some use remote desktop to get back to their machines. We don't use the remote PC functionality. I wish we did, personally, but those are decisions that unfortunately get made elsewhere, and RDP was chosen versus publishing them as an ICA app to people.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provides the flexibility of being used on any device, which makes it easier to work for many anywhere. The transition from people working in an office every day to working from home was seamless, for the most part for us, because almost everybody has a personal computer, whether it's a PC or a Mac. We had a lot of people go out and buy Chromebooks and any other type of device that they saw fit for themselves. They just logged in to our portal and launched their desktops, like they always would. It's very flexible.

The biggest benefit was when we had that transition when offices were closed due to the pandemic. We had thin clients in the offices, so people were already using Citrix whether they were in the office or not. The flexibility provided by that alone was invaluable, in just getting people able to work from home. That's what the product is supposed to do. We didn't really have work-from-as a model. People could do it, but it wasn't a big thing for us. It was more along the lines of when you were done for the day you went home, and if you had to log back in, you could. But for the most part, people were done with work until the next day.

Citrix also plays a part in our business continuity strategies. We have in-house applications and, since we have data centers in various regions, we need the ability for a given application to be live in other data centers, even though we only currently have it running from one. vSphere is the platform that we use for virtualization so we have infrastructure that's the same in every data center. We have a Citrix environment just for DR that we can copy our vDisks into, in Provisioning Services, from one data center to the next. We can then just spin up a Citrix desktop that has access to that DR environment. The other teams then spin up their pieces of infrastructure within that DR bubble and test it. Citrix gives people the ability to quickly get into that DR environment once it has been stood up.

Another aspect is that the solution has resulted in IT efficiencies because we can be pretty agile with quickly reverting changes and quickly implementing new changes. It provides a lot of flexibility for us.

The Provisioning Services are the most valuable feature. We have Premium licensing, so Provisioning Services is huge for us, along with the Virtual Apps and Desktops part. It allows us to have a vDisk for every region, one that can easily be copied between them if we need to, to limit the amount of updates we have to do. 

The ability to deploy shared, hosted desktops and published applications, is also important.

And I would rate the user experience, when using the solution’s technology remotely, as high as it can be. We have offices all over the world, and some of them are in areas that have absolutely terrible internet service. For users in those areas, while we do get complaints that the experience is bad, on most days it's tolerable, and that's even on the bad days when there is extremely high latency. Especially not knowing where people are going to be working from, I would say the user experience is very good.

When it comes to the solution’s centralized policy control, as in the policies you apply to ICA sessions and session hosts or virtual desktop agents, you can control those through group policy, in addition to group policy, or put them in from the console. But either way, as a central management point for the Citrix sessions, in general, it's very good. It gives us flexibility. For example, with the users who are in the bad internet service areas, those policies give us the flexibility to lower their user experience, to dim down the graphics and sound quality. We can do that on-the-fly when they report problems. That generally helps their experience a little bit. So the policy control is good.

And if you have the full line of Citrix products deployed—NetScaler, MAS, all of those items tied together—the visibility is second to none from a monitoring perspective. We use the NetScaler and the MAS and the data that comes through there is almost invaluable, if you have the licensing to use it.

In addition, the security of your intellectual property and data when remote employees are using Citrix, is very high because, with Citrix you can limit access to the local device and access to the network, so you can't copy files if you have certain policies set between the Citrix session and the endpoint. You can prevent printing. You can prevent any data from ever leaving that desktop. And if you're licensed for it, which we are not, they've recently added the ability to watermark screenshots and to have keylog protection in Citrix sessions. If you're licensed for it, that's just an added bonus to the security features that are built-in by default.

The version of Director we're on, the 1912 version, has improved some of the monitoring capabilities that went back to what EdgeSite used to be as a product, when it comes to real-time analytics. If anything could be improved, it might be some of the Director functionality, and some of the dashboard customization, or the overall Director customization. We're limited in what we do. We use Director, as administrators, more than the service desk does, and we limit their access to Director to a few screens. They don't even get to see the full scope of what we see in there. Director is one thing that could be improved upon.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about 10 years. My first experience with any type of virtualization technology was with Citrix. My first helpdesk job was supporting a company that deployed Citrix applications specifically, not desktops. I started out doing it from a support perspective and then got into the administration and engineering side, at that same place. I've never worked on any other products like Citrix.

I would rate the stability very highly, as high as it can be, due to my long-term experience with the product and how it's evolved to the point that it's at. That rating is based on my firsthand knowledge and experience of seeing it used and implemented, day in and day out, not only here, but at other places I've been that are larger than where I am now. I have a high opinion of it in general. It's been my career choice to work specifically with Citrix products.

It scales very well. The limitations we face are our own hardware constraints, because we purchase what we need and we don't generally provide much overhead. Our scalability problems come from limitations on hardware purchases, probably due to budget. If our company doubled in size, we would not have a problem scaling what we have today to meet that. We could probably do it in a couple of days and be just as fine.

We're licensed for 3,000 users. Our primary usage is in the U.S. and the AMEA region. We have about 2,400 users in that region who are active on it at any given time. The rest of those licenses are used in the Asia Pacific region. They're not as active in Citrix because a lot of their stuff is not as centralized as our other infrastructure is. They still don't use a lot of the same stuff. But they do use Citrix for email and for a couple of other things.

We haven't used them recently, but I generally have a high opinion of Citrix technical support. They have the knowledge and give us access to the expertise. I've worked with them in the past on a lot of things and, in some instances, if not for working with them, some of the problems we faced wouldn't have been solved. We didn't have access to anyone else with that level of knowledge.

I just started here about a year ago, but I was involved in setting up the 1912 environment. The process was straightforward. While they've changed the product names over the years, the underlying architecture and the technology, for the most part, has remained the same. I know there have been technological advancements and changes in the underlying architecture, but the overall end result, and some of how it does things, has remained the same. The setup was very easy for me and I think it would be easy even for somebody who is slightly new to the product.

Our most recent deployment did not take long at all. The longest part of it was the formal requests to the other teams and having them provision the virtual machines that we requested for the infrastructure. The longest thing about the deployment for us is getting to the point where we're comfortable putting a desktop out there for user consumption. It's getting them to test and validate that we built that desktop the same as the current one they're using. It's not so much that the deployment takes long because of any Citrix product problems. It's more due to user acceptance testing of the functionality of the desktop itself and the software we use.

Four or five people are involved in deployment, between the ones on our team who build, install, and configure the various infrastructure pieces, and the people that we make requests to who build the database servers and the other virtual machines.

We deploy according to the best practices. We don't follow any specific guides, but we deploy with the minimum specs, plus what we know we need to scale for the user base that we have.

We did it ourselves.

Citrix provides everything in one integrated platform—even the lowest licensing version. It depends on your needs. But if you have the Premium Edition, it provides absolutely every tool you could need to virtualize and deploy.

I'm not involved with the licensing, purchasing, or cost-comparison types of discussions. I'm primarily on the technical side. But I would imagine the integrated platform plays a large part in providing value. Citrix is a leader in this space. Our company has to see some value in the product to pay for it as it is. I would always advocate for it over other similar products.

If you're looking at implementing it, plan as best you can at all levels. Citrix has its consulting methodology for how to properly plan and deploy an environment. I've been in a lot of places where I haven't seen the planning phase happening. Planning goes a long way towards a successful deployment, because you test a lot of things during the testing phase of that, in particular. You see things that you wouldn't otherwise see if you just built it and threw it out there and said, "Hey, use this." You would run into a lot of problems that you wouldn't understand, things that need to be tweaked for any deployment, no matter where you're deploying it. There is a set of standard things that you need to do. Planning goes a long way towards making sure that it's not only accepted by your end users but that it's supportable.

Access control comes into play because we have different Citrix environments for different regions and they don't really cross-talk. We do limit certain things to certain environments, or some things are only available from one environment. People from the other environments have to access it from a different environment, but to them it's seamless because they're all behind the same store-front environments.

• ICA protocol: Beats latency and improves performance for slow connections
• Provisioning service (PVS): Makes deployment of VDI machines a simple breeze
• Profile manager: Profile manager makes it very easy to retain user settings. The whole suite of Citrix XenDesktop provides a complete set for managing the environment.

We have a lot of users in remote locations and some have slow, high-latency connections. So deploying XenDesktop as a VDI solution to connect to our data center overcame the challenges of having remote users and addressed the slow and high latency issues we used to experience prior to deploying Citrix.

I would like to see better documentation of best practices and communication of newly available tools or troubleshooting tools. If you ask several consultants, each will give you almost completely different designs, as the best practice recommendation by Citrix might be absent.

We did a lot of testing and slowly deployed our environment. Given we are also IT consultants and developers, we had a lot of the issues resolved before reaching production. One tip that is also important is training the end users and making sure they understand the setup.

Citrix Premium support is really top notch. They take ownership of the issues and are determined to address it, 9 out of 10 times it is addressed on the spot.

Citrix offers many different components to address all kinds of environments. Simple setup can be done; however, if it is a complex environment, rest assured Citrix will also address it. It all depends on the components used and how to best integrate them.

Implementation was completed by our in-house team.

Citrix is not a cheap solution as it addresses a lot of the challenges that no one else can. With Citrix, we do not have to upgrade our network infrastructure of remote offices, which is a lot of ongoing savings.

Buying the licenses all at once would give the best discounts. Also using a VAR may give best pricing. Shopping through different VARs is a must as you could see 50% of savings.

We evaluated several solutions including MS RemoteApp. Citrix offers better scalability and works much better in terms of WAN and slow connections due to the power of the ICA protocol.

Make sure you study the architecture before rushing to go to production. Also make sure to do a proof of concept and pilot deployment before investing. You can get trial licenses. Once you believe you have the whole solution is ready to go, consult a Citrix consultant to take a quick look before you execute, in the event you do not have all the expertise.

We are a system integrator for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and we also make use of it in our own company. Our primary use case is ensuring that all our applications (e.g. Chrome) can be accessed in a secure manner by employees. As opposed to a VPN, it's much more secure.

The other main reason why we use this solution is because it enables us to centralize our systems, making it easier for the IT team to manage everything.

The biggest benefit of using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is that all of the company's applications and data are situated on one centralized server, removing the need to install applications on the users' physical desktops or laptops. Whenever we want to access anything, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provides a seamless experience that lets us connect to our apps and files from anywhere. It's much like having a virtual office.

This arrangement also improves IT security because it ensures that no potentially-unsafe data will be downloaded on the end-points.

Instead of pointing to any single feature, I would say the most valuable aspect of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the overall product itself. Virtualized apps and desktops, in theory and in practice, are very helpful to users.

Our experience of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is good, but the environment can become complex and difficult to manage at times.

The price is also too high, in my opinion, and could be reduced.

I have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for seven years.

It is stable.

It's a scalable solution. In our company we have about 20 users but some of our customers have between 250-1,000 users.

We have occasionally escalated issues to Citrix's technical support. I would rate their support services a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We have tried other solutions in the past, but in the end we found Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops the best fit for our use cases.

The setup is a complex process as there is a lot of competency required. This isn't just to do with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops itself; it also depends on how complicated the existing infrastructure is. 

Depending on the number of users and the specific requirements, the deployment can take from three days to three weeks. When we deploy the solution for customers, we have to take a number of factors into account, such as the user count, which applications they will be using, whether they will be using desktops or laptops, and other things such as how much data will be sent back and forth.

Then we need to size up the infrastructure (CPU, RAM, storage, etc.) to make sure that there are sufficient resources, and if not, then we will deploy the necessary extra hardware. After that, the next step is to use a virtualization platform such as VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix, and then we download and install the Citrix environment. Finally, within the Citrix solution, we configure the applications to be used by end-points.

I would rate the setup process a five out of ten.

We did our own deployment in-house with the help of one or two staff members.

Ongoing maintenance and support is generally required since there are multiple users, many of which are using Microsoft Windows, and we tend to encounter maintenance issues about once a month. However, most of the problems we see are related more to the Windows environment rather than being the fault of Citrix itself.

There is definitely ROI in the long term because you are getting increased security and productivity (i.e. you can access anything in your company from anywhere) with reduced operational costs.

We're paying for a standard license and, in my view, the price is too high. I would be satisfied with it if it were reduced by about 20-30%. Right now, I would rate the pricing a five out of ten.

My advice to others is to make sure that your physical environment has sufficient computing resources, otherwise the performance won't be as good as it could be and your users won't be happy with it. Besides ensuring stable infrastructure, you should implement the solution with people who have the required experience needed to manage it.

I would rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops an eight out of ten.

We initially implemented it so that our attorneys had an option to work from home. The majority of them did not want to carry a laptop back and forth. Prior to 2020, we did have four of our 40 attorneys using it almost full-time on a work-from-home basis.

We use the following in protecting our environment: Citrix Gateway, Remote Desktop Access, Citrix Secure Browser, Web/URL Filtering, and Contextual Access.

It's amazing that if someone has a sick child, they can still work. It's not that they are completely dead in the water. They can log in and access 99 percent of what they need to, as if they were in the office, and the workflow is the same.

Our previous solution was Terminal Services and that had very low security. My only security concern with this solution is users saving their logins and passwords in the browser. The security it provides is relatively high. The built-in security of Citrix is leaps and bounds above what the basic Microsoft solution had. I did request we add two-factor authentication, but that has not yet been approved. My management feels that I am doing a disservice by trying to add security measures.

But something that makes our security easier is that Citrix provides access control based on device, location, end-user device, or application. One of the reasons we chose Citrix was because it was one of the more secure offerings for remote access. I have faith that Citrix will continue to have that.

In addition, when COVID hit and I maxed out my Citrix licensing, I used the automated analytics to try to ensure everything was running well. It was very nice to be able to log in and see that I wasn't exceeding any capacity of Citrix or the servers themselves.

It provides everything in one integrated platform, and most of it is on one dashboard, which makes it even better. Monetarily, Citrix is a mid-range cost solution compared to some others out there. It does help our attorneys because, with attorneys, time is money. It helps alleviate downtime. I don't think that Citrix actually saves me any money, but it prevents me from losing any.

The most valuable feature has to be the non-persistent desktop. If one of my users messes something up and blows away their desktop, it goes back to what it was originally, before they had an issue.

Our employees also absolutely love the flexibility of using it on any device. We have quite a few people who use iPads and they really like the experience on that, regardless of where they are. The only difference is that the speed of the connection changes, but nothing else does. The consistency is huge.

The solution's centralized policy control and distributed enforcement work well. We have the desktops locked down so users can not add their own software. That's centrally controlled and it does make it easier to be able to present a consistent experience.

I also like that we have redundancy built in. The last time we upgraded, which was three years ago, we put in dual controllers and dual storefront machines. We have never had an outage that the users were aware of. I did have a desktop server crash and was able to restore that from backup. Nobody ever knew. They had had the same experience regardless.

The only thing we have found to be detrimental is when we have tried to find training. I realize that we're looking at it at the worst time possible, with a pandemic going on, but it seems that most of the training offered is learn-by-yourself online. I have a desktop admin who would love to be able to dig deeper into group policy and settings, to be able to admin Citrix a little bit more easily. That's the only thing that I would like to see an improvement on, the availability of training for novice users.

I've been using Citrix for at least 14 years, maybe 15.

It's very stable. It's one of the most stable software applications I run. You set it up and it just goes.

In terms of scalability, it seems that the only things that limit you are your number of licenses and your compute. So scaling is very easy.

Prior to the work-from-home initiative, I had about a dozen users who consistently used it. After COVID and the work-from-home, even though I had only 20 licenses, I had 24 people who were using it. Those four extra people were working part-time in the office and part-time from home so they shared the license. When one was in the office, the other would use it, so I never exceeded my license capacity. And now, since the State of Idaho lifted work-from-home, I'm back down to about eight people who are on it consistently.

The support is excellent. They are wonderful. Luckily I have only had to use them once for a critical issue. I got on the phone, was transferred to an engineer, and had it resolved in less than 20 minutes. For minor issues that are questions, they usually have those resolved in less than 24 hours. And usually, the delay is on my end getting their fix implemented and responding.

We had tried Microsoft Terminal Services and found it sadly lacking for the user experience. We went ahead and implemented Citrix and we have been using it ever since. Terminal Services was Microsoft's attempt to do a remote desktop presentation and it failed miserably. There were a lot of issues and items with Terminal Services. The biggest advantage with Citrix was the consistent experience. Terminal Services was not consistent. If you got too many users on it, desktop icons would move and applications wouldn't load.

While the centralized policy control and distributed enforcement work well, I wish we understood it better. I had a local engineer with Citrix certification build my farm for me. Since it was a brand new concept for me, it was very difficult to grasp at first. He did some preliminary training for us: How to admin it, how to update, how to make things run. But I am in no way an expert on the back-end. If I was able to take the time, which is kind of hard, to learn how all of the nuts and bolts work, I could improve the user experience a little bit. It's a lack of knowledge from my side.

From start to finish, our deployment took about two weeks, and that was mostly because the engineer could not dedicate his full time to me. It was a couple of hours here and there. Overall, the time billed was about 20 hours.

We built the servers, we tested the servers, and then we pushed them out to the handful of attorneys who had requested the ability to work from home. Then we fine-tuned it from there. I really let my users be my test-bed.

Any maintenance is done by me, but it requires minimal maintenance, mostly upgrades.

My advice is get an engineer. Their knowledge can't be matched. A very good one will do it as an educational experience, so you learn as you go. Having somebody who knows Citrix inside and out build it, with best practices and what would suit our needs the best, was invaluable to me. And our engineer has provided support on the minor things afterwards and that has been wonderful. I love the support.

My users either love it or hate it. There is no in-between. The ones who love it do so because it is very consistent in how it works. You log in, everything works. It's the same desktop, the same software, every single time. The people who hate it are the ones who use their desktop to store things, and I don't save the world on their desktops. As soon as they hit that 2 GB mark, I start deleting things. Those are the people who don't know how file stores work.

Even though we run the servers on-prem, we advertise it as a "cloud solution" since it's accessed through a web portal, and that has helped quite a bit in pushing my user base to understand what "cloud" really means. I can see moving this off-prem to a cloud solution in the future, but at this time my budget is frozen, so it's not going to be anytime soon.

I usually don't have to refer to the solution's behavior analytics for detecting anomalies because if something isn't working optimally, my users let me know immediately. They're very vocal if something isn't the way they expect it to be.

Reducing traffic capacity is needed for more than 13000 remote end-users who are working on Oracle E-Business Suite with about 1600 concurrent remote users working simultaneously all over Egypt. These users connect through 3G mobile modems from different service providers.

It increased the no. of users and reduced traffic and data connection cost in addition to increased user productivity.

Application streaming and shadow feature helped end-user online support and training. It also increased user productivity. Since this application has its own traffic encryption proprietary technique, it increased data connection security.

Eliminating the need of Windows terminal server because it increases the cost for each user as each PC that needs to connect must have its own terminal service license.

Extremely stable.

It is flexible and very easily scalable.

Good customer service and excellent technical support.

Previously, I used direct user connection, but it was not secure enough and used a lot of bandwidth.

If you follow the vendor instructions, the setup is straightforward. But it might be a little bit complex in the tuning phase.

Our own in-house team made the full implementation and operation as well.

The setup cost is not much. Although trimming the application settings is somehow tricky and has a lot of effect on performance, it is done only once. For a large number of users, use the concurrent users' license model.

A direct connection was evaluated.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops can be deployed on-premise and in the cloud.

We use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for virtual machines at work for virtual demos for our customers.

The most valuable feature of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the security and it is easy to work with.

I have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for approximately 10 years ago.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are stable.

The scalability of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is good because you can integrate it with other solutions.

I have used the support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are not easy to set up. However, I have the experience and I can do it easily. It could be easier to set up.

The price of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is approximately $300 for the new version called Dash and the license is approximately $900 annually.

My advice to others is Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are good and secure, and they can use their infrastructure from anywhere and anytime.

I rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops a ten out of ten.