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

We use this solution to solve issues related to bandwidth when Oracle forms are used remotely. Also, upgrading or adding any other user application is extremely easy. Oracle E-business Suite is a resource intensive application and database system, which is customized in order to fulfill the government's needs.

This solution has improved user productivity all over Egypt serving the Government financial system. The bandwidth used by the applications was dramatically reduced from 60K to 8K per user. This reduction in bandwidth had reduced the connection cost for the whole project.

The most valuable feature is that users can work remotely from any location. The shadow feature is extraordinary and helps a lot when supporting remote users. The business support team uses this feature to connect to the user session when they are working and can provide instruction on performing complicated tasks.

Direct connection of USB devices on the terminals to be used by streamed applications is very important for printing and the usage of token authentication, but the current version does not support this one hundred percent. It is necessary to support this transparently so that any USB device can be used.

This solution is extremely stable.

Scalability is easy and straightforward.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

The setup is straightforward, although trimming the application streaming is crucial to make the best use of bandwidth.

We used a vendor team and they were excellent.

I suggest using the concurrent user licensing scheme.

Remote Terminal was evaluated in addition to this solution.

My advice is to use Citrix XenApp on Windows VMs, based on VMware Hypervisor.

The main features that I felt were valuable to our organization were:

• Ability to manage iOS and Android mobile devices.
• Application white/black listing.
• Comprehensive rule based policies with relative parity between platforms.

In this case it was an upgrade from XenMobile 8.6 so it was an upgrade to maintain support from the vendor. The main areas of improvement would be around reporting and integration with ShareFile and access to the Worx suite of mobile applications (WorxMail, WorxWeb, WorxNotes).

Even with professional services, deployment can be a challenge; especially when integrating with Exchange when rolling out WorxMail (as an alternative over the native mail clients to containerize and restrict access content). Support is also an area that we struggled with; inconsistent quality between support analysts.

I have used XenMobile for a little over 2 years.

We did encounter deployment issues. Integration with the NetScaler appliances and ShareFile were two of them but one of the biggest issues was around the wrapping of the Worx apps. As the Worx applications were updated, the wrapping tools would periodically also require updates but the releases were sometimes out of sync. Support also was limited with application wrapping. It would have been nice if Citrix Support would have dedicated more staff training for the Worx apps, the wrapping of them and how they are deployed.

XenMobile v9 was relatively stable once it was up and running. After Citrix professional services left the site, we spent another couple of months tweaking and testing before we were willing to migrate our devices to the new environment.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

When you are dealing with the pre-sales teams and the professional services teams, they are really good. Our experience was that typically, if they didn’t know the answer to something, they had access to resources that could bring you closer to a resolution.

This is one area that concerned me with Citrix. I know that during our deployment, Citrix was making some changes internally and it’s possible that we just got caught in that change. But over the two years that I had access to Enterprise support, it was touch and go getting access to a quality engineer who knew how to actually resolve an issue rather than read it out of a prepared script. We always tried make our calls early in the day when we knew we would get access to support either in North America or UK/Germany/Ireland; otherwise it was always a game of phone tag when dealing with some of the other global call centres.

We did not use a previous solution. We upgraded from a previous version of XenMobile as we had a significant investment in the Citrix stack already.

Initial setup was complex. We had integration into ShareFile, AppController (for the Mobile Application Management -MAM), NetScalers and then we tried to deploy the mobile apps at the same time, so we could get away from ActiveSync. I felt that the complexity simply increased with the addition of integration points. Even our professional services team had difficulties at times as the products are complex on their own, much less when you are trying to get them to work together. I would recommend phasing the deployments, if your schedule permits. Start with getting XenMobile and the AppController up and running first, wrap and deploy the Worx apps and then worry about ShareFile later in the project. The secondary concern is for the end user, because it’s a lot of change to to cope with if there is a "Big Bang" approach.

We used Citrix’s professional services for the engagement. While they were very easy to deal with and tried to accommodate our design, I think they were still new to their roles.

Sit down and seriously review your mobility strategy. If you don’t have one, draft something before you get started. Consider where you feel your organization is going to be in the next 2 to 5 years. I would consider an mobile device management (MDM) solution to have a lifespan of about 3 years as they have to adapt to a series of vendors (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) that move a lot faster than they do.

Determine what features you are planning to roll out to your users over this timeframe (i.e. access to internal documentation [ShareFile], access to Internet sites [WorxWeb], etc.) as Citrix has a variety of options that can affect which licenses you will need and where you can save money. If you have an existing Citrix investment, look at the Enterprise licensing as you get quite a bit extra,(such as ShareFile for free).

We did not evaluate alternatives due to our existing Citrix investment, so we opted to stay with Citrix.

XenMobile is a good, stable product, but make sure you investigate what features you are looking to roll out and decide whether XenMobile isn’t overkill. Depending on what want to deploy, you may need to examine your resource requirements to not just deploy, but support as well. Training isn’t cheap for any Citrix course but XenMobile from an administration perspective, is pretty simple to learn.

The user experience is comparable to XenApp (our past presentation server), with the same look and feel as a normal full desktop in the head office.

It still uses ICA protocol, which means we did not have to increase the WAN bandwidth to deliver same user experience across all the sites. We did not have to increase telco cost to provide same user experience from sites outside of the head office.

In the past, when we were using the presentation server from Citrix, login time was taking up to eight minutes. XenDesktop reduced login time to less than two minutes. Managers who move around can take their work at any point in time to a new location without having to login from scratch. That increased productivity.

Our organisation has not been successful in delivering a multi-media experience via VDIs. This is one of the areas we are hoping to improve by upgrading to version 7.8.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

Stability issues due to storage performance caused initial grief. Now it is working. We are using dedicated VDIs for users. We have half of the 1200 VDIs running from one DC and the rest from a secondary DC.

Scalability is good, but it required a lot of learning while our organisation were going through it.

Citrix support was good. They can always do better.

Since we already were using Citrix presentation server, our migration met the same look and feel requirement for the business. Citrix XenDesktop is the leading product for VDIs.

Initial backend infrastructure was easy for our organisation for VMWare and storage, because we were already running VMWare for server virtualisation. Now it is just too many. We are running 1200 VDIs.

It was a hybrid implementation. Design was done by vendor and implementation was done jointly.

Our model for ROI was not financial. It was user experience and opportunity productivity loss savings. If we are to do this work again, I would recommend using DataCore Software Defined Storage using commodity hardware to run a VDI host farm to reduce storage and DR cost.

Get the full business requirement and test the end-to-end performance and the capacity for DR before going full-fledged. Also, understand the licensing cost. Having dedicated VDIs for our organisation saved us lots of headache:

It was used to publish internal resources for our clients.

Our clients were very happy with the technology because they could continue with their work. For example, one of our customers had headquarters and branches. All users in the branches were using Citrix Virtual Apps and they were very happy because they could work from the branches. It helps the company or the environment to centralize all its resources and allows all users from all the branches to reach those resources without needing them in every branch. It saves costs, operations, and maintenance—everything.

It's a very useful solution for on-premise environments because it creates flexibility by serving the resources and providing accessibility to users who are far away.

In addition, when remote users are using the solution it provides security for the organization's intellectual property and data.

The solution provides everything in one integrated platform, which is great for our customers.

Citrix Virtual Apps is the most valuable feature. Many customers use this feature to publish only applications, and not the full desktop. They can publish the internal resource or allow the end-user to reach a site or an application without having the full desktop. That's why they love this feature. It helps them save on resources.

It also provides the flexibility of being used on any device. It makes for a good employee experience because they are able to log in using any device and reach the resource.

We also utilized the centralized policy to apply things to all users or to categorize the users. Once users were categorized we could apply policies based on the categories. It was very helpful. We could allow users in category "A" to reach some of the resources, and allow users in category "B" to reach other resources, based on their requirements. For example, we could block USB for some categories and allow it for other categories.

There is also access control based on device, location, end-user device, or application. This is a good feature because it adds to the flexibility. You can give access based on many factors.

The Endpoint Management solution needs improvement when it comes to mobile device management. For example, they are still not supporting Windows 10 and this feature is required by many customers.

I have used Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about six years. I have done many deployments.

It's stable.

It's also scalable.

We have deployed it to companies that have between 500 and 3,000 employees.

There are people who respond quickly, but others take a long time to solve things. They need to focus on support and to improve support procedures.

The initial setup is "medium," between complex and straightforward. It still depends on an SQL database, and there are many components, compared to other solutions. Other solutions are easier than Citrix.

On average, deployment takes one week.

Our implementation strategy is just to follow the installation guide.

I have worked with VMware Horizon. To be frank, Horizon is easier to use because it's an endpoint solution. Horizon covers everything, one of the main points being that it covers Windows 10 for mobile device management. With Citrix, this does not exist. Many customers who are looking for this feature cannot use Citrix. At the end of the day, the customer is looking for one solution to manage everything: Android, iOS, Windows 10, virtual applications, and virtual desktop.

Just follow the guide.

Our clients used the following for protecting their environment: Citrix Gateway/Single Sign-on; Citrix Secure Browser; Web/URL Filtering; Web App Gateway; Citrix Endpoint Management; Citrix ADC.

Remote workers/branch offices needed quick, reliable access to resources at the Corporate Data Center no matter what kind of device they were working from.

It has allowed us to provide network/application resources to anyone anywhere, no matter what kind of device the end user had, we were usually able to find a compatible Citrix receiver app.  That gave our user base flexibility to be anywhere and still be productive.

I found the ease of deployment, scalability, and security to be to our benefit when supplying virtual applications/resources to our clients.

Printing is huge, there are a lot of shortfalls with supporting printing over XenApp.  I know it isn't all a Citrix issue, Microsoft needs to do some work to get the print subsystem streamlined since it apparently hasn't been looked at since Windows NT4 days.

More than seven years.

Very easy to scale, virtual servers can be stood up quickly on your virtual platform using Citrix PVS

No previous solution

ThinApp

Our installation is currently on-premises, but we have already decided that we will move to the cloud. In general, we are using XenApp to make a virtual protected environment in order to link our other applications through Citrix. We want to link data or applications, it depends on the case. Sometimes we don't want to have links from application to application but just for the applications to share the data which they are using. This product provides us some flexibility in the architecture.  

I'm not the end-user of the application. My position is very high in the organization. I know that the users who are using this product like it, but I don't know what exactly they like or what might make it separate from similar solutions. From my point of view, the reason they like it is this flexibility that they have. They can connect one application to another application or just to use the data. They have applications locally and use the data in the cloud in a very secure way. They have more flexibility using this solution.  

The place where this application can most probably be improved is in the integration with other environments. Right now we have it on-premises, but our plan is to have it on cloud and we have already taken steps with Microsoft to implement this goal. After we move it to the cloud, we will want to add other applications and other data sources to what is already available in order to more easily move the data from one place to another and to use it from different applications. Broader integration would give the user more flexibility. This is why, from my point of view, integrating with other environments is the most important feature that needs to be expanded.  

As an example, IBM has a cloud solution that gives users the capability to connect between different clouds. No matter what kind of cloud you are using the data becomes universal through the capabilities of the IBM solution. You can ensure data security and can move data from one cloud to another. This is the kind of thing I mean by integration. It is an integration of administrative work, resource usage and also of the different environments. Right now we have some things on-premise and we have part of it in the cloud. Most probably will be not only be using Microsoft cloud in the future but also Amazon and Google as well. We want to have this application everywhere in this environment and to be able to use only one interface to let us know what volume of resources we are using, how much different solutions cost us, and if our usage is effective. This way we can make evaluations and change if necessary. The economy of our model is very important for us.  

The other less important point is that the deployment could be faster. We deployed the solution with the help of a vendor, and I do not blame the vendor that things seemed to come together a little slowly because it was not easy to do. I think the implementation can be simplified a little by the manufacturer.  

I have been using this product for around three years.  

XenApp is a very stable solution. This is one of the reasons we were using it. I had some experience with the product at the previous company and we decided just to use the same solution for this company because it is really stable.  

I don't know yet how the product rates in the area of scalability. We are currently moving from one environment to another, and that is an early step in our process. I don't know about scaling because it is a step we will worry about later. These are interim steps we are taking in the plan that we have right now. Our end goal is to be completely in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment. When we achieve that, the next step is to use the application to scale. So we are still in a sort of proof of concept period right now where we don't want or have the need to test scalability.  

We currently have 53 people using the solution. Most of them are just users from the office, but we have around 10 engineers and IT people who are capable of doing everything we need for implementation and maintenance.  

Because we are using a partner to interface between us and Microsoft, we do not have contact with Microsoft's technical support. The partner has been successful in covering everything we need.  

I changed my employment over the past two years. Earlier, I was part of the pharmaceutical company Bcom and we were using the same XenApp product there. Then I moved to a smaller Bulgarian company. We were using a different version of Xenapp there and we had a somewhat different experience. The support that Microsoft provided was different in each case. In the first case, it was a global corporation. In the second case, it was a local group of companies and we were supported by the local Microsoft office.  

But in each case, the reason why I switched products was that I changed employment and not that I changed from an entirely different solution to this one.  

The level of difficulty of the initial setup depends on the situation. Because we have this application through a Microsoft provider which is directly working with Microsoft, they have enough staff and experience with it to set it up. It was very easy for us just to use them.  

If we had to do it alone, I don't believe we had the capacity to do it without a lot of trouble. We prefer this model of having some kind of agent who is more knowledgeable and experienced do the setup. They already know exactly how to set up the environment for using the application, and we would have had to learn it all anew.  

The deployment of the solution was more than five months, but it took that long because we probably caused some delay. We were not pushing for the implementation to be completed, we changed our offices, and many other things happened in between. So it is not because of the application or the group doing the deployment, but because we were moving slowly ourselves.  

We had a third party, the supplier, do the initial implementation for us.  

We did not evaluate other options when making the decision to take on this solution because I already had a positive experience with this product in the past. I wanted to use the same solution because I know it and I know that it works and that it would do what we needed it to do. Stability was the main factor in making the decision.  

Right now the computing environment is changing very fast with cloud, hybrid, containers and other options like that. We wanted to have something which was going to allow us to use a hybrid solution until we define the final model that we want to use.  

Advice that I would give to people considering this solution is to use our model of implementation. I absolutely recommend using a local supplier who is knowledgeable and who has experience with the product and deployment because then you won't have any problems. We are only using it. We don't care how it is set up. We don't care about the model itself, but only that the result fits our requirements. This supplier is doing all the things we don't want to have to learn for us.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven-out-of-ten.  

Because this is a tech product, it has an app used for application virtualization.

Your servers are in a remote location, but your server is in UK and you are operating from Australia (theoretically). In this case, you want only Outlook to be used by your end users, therefore what you do is virtualize an Outlook from the servers located in the UK, but your users are using it in Australia as if it is in their local machine. It would be as if the user is utilizing Outlook in his/her machine, but it is running on the servers located in the UK.

This is an app. It virtualizes the application on your desktop. Supposing you have to enter it, you need to login and you will see the Outlook icon on the console. Outlook will open in your system, but the server is in the UK, which is utilizing the resources. Not your local resources, but those in the UK, the UK servers.

It helps you to virtualize your application, so whenever the user needs the application, they have it in virtualized form.

It is user-friendly and easy to use. It helps in many ways. The installation and maintenance are good.

It is progressing and improving day-by-day. Before, we had 6.5 version. The recent one that we used was version 7.1.5. 

There are many latency and slowness issues, which are things looked after by Citrix. 

There have been many issues with stability.

Scalability depends on the server and the number of users in the organization. You need to have capacity planning on how you are providing to users. If the server is a bit old, like the hardware is HPE Generation 4 servers, you are requesting the server to handle more than a hundred users, then it will work slowly. Therefore, capacity planning and the way you plan the architecture is very important for this.

Tech support is good. I would rate them as a seven out of 10.

Previously, I was using XenApp, but there were different products, like ThinApp and VMware. 

The initial setup is simple.

It is affordable. The product, XenServer, is free to use, and XenApp has a one month free license. The licenses are affordable, but the support is a bit expensive, though worth the value.

For three or four years, there were no other options other than the Citrix XenApp. Now, we have ThinApp, VMware, and one more application from Microsoft. While we have options now, XenApp stands out above the rest.

This is a very good tool for virtualizing your application. The support is good. It is affordable. I would recommend it to users who are looking to use XenApp. 

The most valuable feature to me is the flexibility to publish just apps, just virtual desktops, both, or even physical desktops. Having so much flexibility in one solution, especially one that works as well as Citrix, is a huge advantage.

We have a large number of Mac users who need access to Windows programs. We tried many methods for allowing them to work from the Macs, including connecting them via remote desktop to physical Windows computers. This solution removes the troubles we had with VPN, single-use VMs and/or dedicated physical machines.

I guess eliminating the slight difference in the web interface compared with the Receiver interface for saving files to local devices would be an improvement, but I have a feeling it's just not possible.

I have been using this solution for about six months.

Users have some trouble adjusting to the Receiver interface, but other than that, everything has been very easy.

My experience has been excellent.

It's straightforward, but I ended up building the "back end" to be more robust than I had initially planned in order to stay in line with best practices.

We did everything in-house. Since we have the capabilities in-house for such projects, I prefer to go through an implementation, at least as a functioning demo, before hiring outside contracts. In our case, we were able use the functioning demo we built.

That's difficult to honestly figure, since we've expanded the use of the applications to people and scenarios that weren't available to them before.

Get honest advice from Citrix on licensing, then ask someone who is using it in the same capacity as you plan to.

We set up demos of a few different solutions. None of them were as easy to deploy, to license, or to use as this, nor did any match the flexibility.

Build yourself a demo, following best practices. You'll likely find it to be pretty easy to do, and you'll have a solid foundation if you do need to hire outside help.