AppSense pride ourselves on our close relationship with Citrix, many of you will be aware of the joint sales and marketing activities in use to help deliver a joint Citrix + AppSense solution to enterprise customers. However further to the commercial relationship, I want to take a few minutes to touch on one of the many close technical relationships AppSense and Citrix share at a product development level.
Joe Nord, Citrix Systems Product Architect , Application Streaming and User Profile Manager, recently published a blog on the Citrix Community Site detailing some recent joint product development between Citrix and AppSense to ensure the personalization of Citrix Streamed Appplications – Article can be viewed here.
Further to Joe’s post, I have put together a few details on the significance of using Citrix Streamed Applications with AppSense, and touched on some of the joint development work Joe details in his blog.
AppSense are a recommended solution for providing advanced personalization capabilities over and above the capabilities of Roaming Profiles and Citrix User Profile Manager – Specifically when looking at personalizing Citrix Streamed Applications.
AppSense can personalize a Citrix Streamed Application, take those settings and personalize the same application delivered by any other means such as published or local install, and then re-apply any changes made in the other delivery mechanisms back into the Citrix Streamed Application. This is achieved by hooking into the application in question and managing the capturing and delivery of settings within the actual application itself.
With the enhancements made by Citrix to Streamed Applications 5.2, some changes were made to the hooking order of various Citrix components, which in turn may have affected some of the AppSense hooks.
As a strategic solution for some of Citrix’s largest customers, Citrix technologies and updates must be fully compatible with AppSense technologies (and vice versa) in order for customers to upgrade to the latest Citrix or AppSense product version, in this case, Streamed Applications 5.2. To ensure this always happens, Citrix and AppSense share many technical development and architecture deep dive meetings to guarantee both products seamlessly integrate and co-operate with one another. For this particular project, Joe and his team(s) worked closely with lead AppSense developers to ensure the hooks are performed in the correct order and personalization is transparent to the user and the administrator.
As part of the project, Citrix and AppSense identified, agreed on, developed and tested a joint Citrix Streamed Applications 5.2 + AppSense Environment Manager 8.x solution.
Moving forward, there remains a mechanism in place for all future product development based on regular technical meetings, co-development, and joint testing & Q.A. programmes.
I hope this gives you a little insight into the behind the scenes work that goes on between Citrix and AppSense to ensure pioneering technology is robust, scalable and adopted by thousands of enterprise customers around the world.
Again, the orginal Citrix article can be found here
Thanks
Gaz
AppSense 