[THIN] Jim Kenzig's(http://thethin.net) Iforum 2002 Review... Very very long
- From: Jim Kenzig <jimkenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, citrixse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 11:27:10 -0500
Hello Everyone,
Once again this years Iforum event was held at the Dolphin Hotel Resort in
Walt Disney World Florida. The Dolphin is well suited for this event and the
service provided was excellent.
This year at Iforum instead of going as an attendee, I attended as a vendor,
greeting people and partnering with Emergent Online who sponsored my trip.
Thanks to the great people at EOL for the arrangements. I spent much of my
time in the conference hall and did not get to attend any of the breakout
sessions. This is why I asked for input on these sessions and have posted
them below my review at the end. John Rowlandson especially gave a very
detailed and useful review that all should read. Thanks to all who
contributed.
I did have a chance to check out most all of the vendors in the Conference
hall, the general session, as well as the Citrix Development lab and I do
have quite a bit to write about that will interest many of you. I arrived
late Sunday afternoon and missed the breakout sessions that were given that
day. I am told that they were well attended but I heard a lot of dismay from
others that Citrix waited to the near last minute to announce the Sunday
sessions. To make matters worse I was told that these sessions were probably
some of the best offered over the 3 days and a lot of people missed out on
them, myself included.
Sunday night the event was kicked off by Dave Jones of Citrix giving a toast
in the exhibit hall followed by a Press and VIP tour of the hall. I used
this time to get around and talk to some of the vendors, which I will review
below.
The exhibit hall opened to everyone at 7 pm and was very well attended. I
gave out all of my thethin.net T-shirts very quickly at the Emergent booth
and Emergent Online also gave out 500 t-shirts offering the chance to win
$1000 if the shirt was worn on Monday or Tuesday and the person was randomly
picked to win. Emergent gave out $500 each day also randomly to one person
whom attended their booth and had their card scanned. I quickly noticed that
although Microsoft was a Platinum sponsor of the event they chose not to
have a booth in the conference hall. Very curious. The conference hall
appeared to be much "emptier" then previous years events with no booths on
entire portions of the back and side walls. I even noticed a few booths that
the vendor did not even bother to show up. Thanks to Barry Flanagan, Citrix
SE who introduced me to just about every Citrix person we could track down.
It was nice to put faces with the names.
=====
My first stop at the conference hall was to seek out Brian Madden and get a
copy of his newest book (http://brianmadden.com and also linked to at Amazon
on the homepage of thethin.net) Brian is a savvy author at the ripe young
age of 24 and already on his second book. Watch for more great things from
him. His latest book is really just an update to his first book on Metaframe
but for those of you who were fortunate enough to get a free copy at the
event, you walked away with one of the best freebies given out. The HP booth
that Brian was at featured racks of new servers and blade servers that
attendees could check out.
======
SoftriCity - One of the newcomers to the market since last year and one of
the most exciting new products at the show was the Softricity booth
(http://www.softricity.com) The product provides "on demand" application
delivery allowing for many non conventional applications and products that
do not run well under Terminal Services to be able to be pushed out to or
"streamed" to the end user and ran as if it were actually installed on their
local machine. They have proprietary software called SystemGuard which
allows an application to be ran in its own virtual environment. There is a
great whitepaper that explains how the product works with Citrix at:
http://www.softricity.com/news/ecollateral/public/Citrix-and-Softricity.pdf
======
RTO Software (http://www.rtosoft.com )(who changed their name from Kevsoft
just prior to the show) made its debut at the show this year showcasing
their TScale Product. TScale improves your Terminal Servers performance by
as much as 35% basically by optimizing the dll's that applications use and
increasing the amount of virtual memory available. With this method by
using the product it gives System admins the ability to have more users on a
server and improve overall performance.
======
PRINTING
Printing again was another big theme this year with booths by ThinPrint,
UniPrint, triCerat and Emergent Online all offering a Universal Print Driver
Solution. Citrix Metframe XP FR3 even has a new COLOR UPD in the wings. I'll
try and cover each one below.
======
ThinPrint (http://www.thinprint.com) announced a new platform called .Print.
ThinPrint .print (`dot print´) is the basis on which applications can be
created much more quickly for the mobile internet. Whereas content was
previously elaborately prepared and adapted for various end devices like
Notebook, PDA, or mobile phone, the complete task is now performed by the
so-called .print Engine. Depending on your requirements, content can be
viewed as text or as preview in original format on your monitor or display
screen, or even printed directly over Bluetooth or infrared. The ability to
print from the nearest printer means that while you?re on the go, you can
send data of any volume across even the smallest mobile telephone,
regardless of display size.
======
Uniprint (http://www.charon.com/uniprint/) Charon Systems released an
updated version of their Universal Printer driver software UniPrint.
UniPrint will print to any printer - if a client can print to the printer
outside of Citrix®, so will UniPrint. The manufacturer's printer driver is
installed on a network print server or locally on a client's PC/laptop.
======
triCerat (http://www.triCerat.com) TriCerat announced an updated version to
their Screwdrivers FXP printer management software with at the show that
allows for total bandwidth control and USB Support as well as a utility
called RegSet which easily allows you to save and restore, set, and delete
end user registry settings via a GUI. TriCerat also still has it?s
desktop2001 utility to lock users published desktops and Reflect utility to
assist with replication of directories.
======
Emergent Online (http://www.emergentonline.com) As I stated earlier I
attended the event as a vendor. My trip was sponsored by Emergent Online and
I spent the greater amount of my time at their booth in the conference hall.
EOL offers much more than just a Universal Printer driver but I have found
that their version is a step above some of the others. The new version of
the software offers two exciting new features:
PAGE STREAMING: no more waiting for the entire print job to be sent to the
client before printing can begin. Instead, pages are "streamed" down to the
client one by one as they get generated by the Universal Printer. This means
that your printer will start dishing out pages upon clicking that PRINT
command.
NETWORK-BASED PRINTING: a radically new approach to network-based printing
enables ANY client device (PC`s, thin clients, MACs, and others), regardless
of platform or operating system, to print to ANY shared network printer,
regardless of make, model, or print driver. Better yet, network-based
printing with EOL Universal Printer? v3.02 does not require any client
software! Basically what this means is that your client is not tied to any
one printer. If your device can get to the network print server you can
print to the closest network printer to you. A huge asset to places like
hospitals for example where doctors move from floor to floor yet need to
print.
Emergent makes an entire line of solutions including
EOL AppPortal? - a unique way to publish applications via an Outlook style
menubar
EOL Desktop Manager? - A lockdown utility to allow for locked down published
desktops
EOL Time Zones? - Use different time zones on one server
EOL Universal Printer? - Described above
EOL Watchdog Services? - A utility to watch and delete autocreated printers,
the ica and ima service and shutdown servers
EOL Profile Sweeper? - A utility to clean out junk in profiles
EOL SetPassword? - A sweet utility you can publish so users can easily reset
their password
EOL SetPrinter? - A free utility to set the users default printer
EOL ListDrivers? - A free utility to list and/or delete installed drivers
Emergent Online is also now into the service arena and offere 99Point9.com
(http://www.99point9.com) as an online pay per incident tech support portal
which partners with and has content from http://thethin.net. Emergent has
also recently announced a new Disaster Recovery solution service called
Econtinuity. (http://www.econtinuity.com) Econtinuity is a complete
centralized application and storage solution for corporations to recover
from disaster.
=====
Wyse (http://www.wyse.com) It's the "new" Wyse with a revamped website and a
new "from the client through the network to the server" initiative. Wyse is
looking to shake things up. It is undoubtable that this means that Wyse is
going to get more into also offering software solutions as it ominously
mentioned in a recent press release
(http://www.wyse.com/about/pr/2002/1031_iforum.htm ) its plans for a product
that scales servers by 35%. This of course sounds exactly like and I would
venture to guess most presumably is RTO Software's TScale product repackaged
for them.
I had the opportunity to speak with David Rand, Director of Marketing at the
event and was given some insight into the future direction Wyse is taking. I
got the feeling that "there is a new sheriff in town" at the company and
they are looking to shake things up and solve any past shortcomings. I was
glad to have the ability to voice some of my thoughts and concerns about the
companies products. And yes finally they have a new device the 9440XL with
PXe(standard image updating system) built in. A robust client with legacy
ports and XP embedded. I am still convinced that this is what the industry
needs and the direction things will need to go. TS/Citrix do not address
streaming media, storage for super large print jobs and shockwave/java
applications. Yet the public demand for such items has increased 10 fold. A
robust browser (that is easily updated via server management software) makes
a lot of sense to solve this problem.
Wyse also recently partnered with Citrix and National Semiconductor on a
demo website to show how different industries can use "Server Centric"
(formerly called Server based in my book)in their organization.
The site is at http://www.sccspectrum.org/index2.cfm In days and week to
come as more content is added this should prove to be a very useful
undertaking.
======
There were many other terminal vendors of which I had candid conversations
with including Televideo(who had a cool new tablet PC), ChipPC, Igel,
Neoware, Maxspeed, and Esprit to name the ones I can think of. I expressed
my views on the need for a client that can easily be managed, reimaged
easily and have the ability to run streaming video/shockwave via a robust
browser to any of them that would listen. It is NOT enough to just have a
well built device. Administrators want to be able to use 1 (ONE) tool to do
it all. Having 3 or 4 different management solutions is too much for any one
organization. I stressed the fact that all of these vendors would do well
to standardize on a management protocol that not only worked with PC's but
also with their clients such as Altiris (http://www.altiris.com) It would be
VERY nice if a single standard protocol could be adopted that allowed for
the different vendors to manage each others units as well, like say PXe for
Imaging and something else similar to Altiris for management. Everyone in
the entire thin client industry would win. The larger companies like Neoware
and Wyse would do well to collaborate on such a venture.
======
LINQware (http://www.linqware.com) An awesome Instant Messaging product
called Collabrix, LINQware is most probably setting the standards on how
corporate IM should work with the ability to have true application sharing.
Pricing of the product leaves little to be desired though and in an
oppressed economy I seriously think they need to rethink their pricing
structure. I was quoted $83 a user if I wanted to run it on my servers. With
a thousand users it will be virtually impossible for me and I am sure most
other corporations to get the powers that be to spend 83 thousand dollars on
just an IM product.
=======
The Citrix Development Lab
This is one of my favorite parts of Iforum. Being able to speak with the
developers and actually see and give them feedback on the new products
Citrix is planning on releasing. John Rowlandson does such a great job of
explaining his experience in his review below and it is exactly what I would
of written. So see John?s review below.
=======
Mondays Keynote:
It seemed like Mark Templeton and Bob Kruger were holding back this year and
the whole keynote took on a drab matter of fact approach compared to last
years bells and whistles demo approach. I am not sure what happened to the
excitement factor but it seemed nonexistent this year. I took very little
away from it. Once again Citrix chose to have customers telling their
stories of how they used Citrix in their organization and how great it is.
This is such a waste of my time because I wouldn?t be there if I did not
know what Citrix was. The what seemed like an hour and half of time could
much better have been spent showing new product and features or attending a
breakout session. Heck I would even rather watch the 7 minute virtual
workplace video again then have to listen to success stories. I think the
only people that truly enjoy the success stories are the Citrix Folk. And
someone please tell me why Citrix was so anal about picture taking at this
event. I almost had my camera ripped from my hands by one security person.
There really wasn't anything said or shown here that even resembled "fresh,
new and proprietary" that a damning photo could be taken of that I saw. That
was a real turn off. My suggestion is, if they take this same approach next
year, skip the keynote and head over to the Boardwalk and get breakfast
somewhere there.
Overall though I would have to say that the entire event was very
worthwhile. Thethin.net group had a great dinner on Monday night at Shulas
(all of my pictures I took at the event over the 2 days are at
<http://thethin.net/citrixse/iforum2002/>) I met a lot of new people, and
had a very enjoyable time. Citrix added the Sunday breakouts at
The last minute, making it overall apparent that next years event might be
better off being scheduled for 3 full days instead of 2 so that attendees
have the opportunity to get to more sessions. The most sessions an attendee
could get to is probably 9 but in reality they end up only getting to about
4 of them because the ones they want to see are full by the time they get to
the session.
There is a whole lot more I could write about but with John's review below
this will come out to be over 10 pages. I hope that this helps those who did
not attend get a great overall view of the event.
Regards,
Jim Kenzig
CEO/Webmaster
http://thethin.net
http://worldofasp.com
http://virtualdotnet.com
http://Portals.US
=======================================================================
Below are some attendee comments and reviews that have been sent to me:
=======================================================================
Hi Jim,
I'm in charge of integration and development at IPM, a Citrix Platinum CSN,
and I'm attending iForum more from a developer perspective (I'm actually at
Developer Day today beefing up my custom CDA development skills).
My brief thoughts re: iForum (not necessarily in any particular order):
- as usual, everything was done in a big way...the only proverbial "fly in
the ointment" was that some of the sessions were scheduled in rooms that
were too small, and I found myself closed out of two sessions (one was
repeated later in the day).
- I have already implemented numerous NFuse/CSG/RSA integrated sites for
clients (some with extensive customizations and add-ins like NFuse activity
logging, feedback pages, etc.), so I didn't learn all that much.
A notable exception was Barry Flanagan's ICA deployment session, where he
demonstrated a few ways to do silent ICA client installs to users, without
any intervention at all. I also thought that Roddy Rodstein gave a great
session on customizing NFuse Elite.
I'm a bit disappointed with the way developer day started, as I was under
the impression that there were two parallel tracks for CDA development - one
for script CDA development, and the other for WebForm CDA development. I
found out this morning that WebForm CDA development will only be covered for
a 2 hour period this afternoon. I had basically signed up for DevDay for
the WebForm development, as I already have all of the knowledge of script
CDA development that will be covered today.
You can use my name or not, as you prefer.
Regards,
Sam Jacobs, IPM
P.S. As a little anecdote, I was in the Alumni bus with Mark Templeton as we
went to the Magic Kingdom last night. We left the Dolphin at approx. 6:40
last night (the alumni party was supposed to begin an hour earlier that the
regular party), but the Disney driver got lost (!), and the usual 10 minute
trip took over an hour! I would imagine some heads will roll!
Hi Jim,
As a followup regarding my experience at Developer Day, while I certainly
did learn something in yesterday's class, I felt that:
You cannot cover both script and WebForm CDA development in one day -
there's just too much material to properly cover even only the basics, if
you're going to have labs (which you must).
Both development environments are based on an object model (from Sequoia),
but there was no mention of the model, or how everything fits together.
While the Application, Response, Request & Dictionary objects WERE
mentioned, they were barely explained.
If I didn't have my prior Elite development experience, I probably would
have gotten lost in the class. Because of the amount of material that
needed to be covered, the instructors had to move way too fast.
Regards,
Sam
============================================================================
=============
The last session I made it to at iForum was "Metaframe XP Printing -
Integration in a Project Oriented Fashion" by Doug Brown.
In the end of the session he demonstrated a tool called "Project
Compatibility" that is NOT an official Citrix tool or product but does
remove all the headache from the wtsuprn file and client printer mappings.
Jim may have posted out this in the past but anyone who didn't check it out
then, needs to now.
Project Compatibility will do the following:
look at your existing driver mappings and tell you if any are wrong
read the event logs for any failed autocreated printers and automatically
create the proper mapping on ALL Metaframe servers.
Remove any drivers/mappings you want removed
automatically stay current as new drivers/mappings come out via web update
there was more but that's all I have in my notes.
He demonstrated it for us and it was pretty impressive.
Anyone who deals with autocreated client printers and mapped drivers needs
to check this out.
http://www.dabcc.com/pc/
Have Fun!
Greg
============================================================================
==============
I wish that the Citrix IForum would be early in the year instead of the
fall. For our company we have traveling freezes on by the fall quarter each
year and this expense is always an argument that I lose each time. I know
the value of seeing what is out there first hand and to mingle with the
experts of the thin world would pay large dividends but when you have a
stock price that needs to be met and an expense that others don't envision
as being important, it is always one of the first expenditures cut from the
budget. I know IForum has always been in the fall but it would be nice if
they could do it late in the 1st quarter, early second quarter sometime to
avoid this planned expenditure being cut from the budget. I can't
imagine I am the only person that has this issue but maybe I'm wrong.
Jay C. Jensen
Field Systems - La Crosse
=======================================================================A
Below is a great review by John Rowlandson who came all the way from
Australia! JK
As I arrived at the Dolphin early due to flight arrangements, I was able to
attend the Sunday sessions which seemed to have been added into the program.
Having never been to iForum before I wasn't sure what to expect.
Some initial confusion on finding the session rooms, left quite a few People
wandering round looking for the elusive northern hemisphere X.
My 1st breakout session was "Configuring and Deploying the PNagent", having
had a quick look at PNagent before the iForum and realizing that it is
required for FR2 Client to Server redirection, this was one area I was keen
to learn more about. One important point to note is that PNagent looks to be
the Primary client moving forward from 6.30.x with Citrix seeing the full PN
Client taking a background role.
Basically, PNagent is setup to communicate with a Nfuse 1.7 Server and
display the Application Information in Windows Start Menu Folders on the
client dynamically. These folder properties are set for each published
application along with optional desktop icons.
The Nfuse 1.7 server has a separate folder on the webserver to contain all
the PNagent details.
One thing to note is that with lots of applications, the refresh file Pulled
by the client can get quite large and impede very low bandwidth connections.
Next was "Content redirection with XP FR2" hosted by Barry Flanagan , this
session was quite technical in its content which was my preference.
PNagent is a prerequisite for Client to Server content redirection. For
instance if Visio is published in your farm and .vsd enabled for content
redirection, a client without Visio installed locally will launch an ica
session and open a locally accessed .vsd diagram. This is done by the agent
adding file type extensions and creating scripts to launch the relevant
published app. Client drive mapping is required for this feature to function
along with XP FR2.
The other redirection is Server to Client, which is limited to http links,
if a http link is executed in an ICA outlook or excel session (in fact most
apps except Lotus Notes and MS word), S to Client redirection will attempt
to launch the browser session on the client locally if the link is
accessible. The idea behind this being to save bandwidth. This happens by
default as soon as redirection is enabled in metaframe XP. I personally
already use this feature and find it quite good.
Redirection can be set for a Single User, an Individual Server or the entire
farm, the setting is also checked by Metaframe in this order.
Citrix SDK was then hosted by a Citrix Customer and was very detailed about
the SDK's available within Metaframe XP and how to script day to day
operations that take an eternity to do manually in the CMC. An in house app
was shown that they had written for session management and shadowing that
they had written for helpdesk staff so that full access to the CMC wasn't
required.
Having not seen anything on this side of Metaframe and programming it has
certainly given me some ideas on where I can move my installation.
One of my highlights was the "Access Central" area, basically a room With
all the upcoming Citrix products and senior developers or development
managers standing next to the various servers giving a one on one session
and discussing the next generation products. Being able to stand there with
a product and work with the people who design it, rather than going thru
tech support was very beneficial.
Of interest to me was FR3 XP, Project Pearl (User collaboration tool), CSG
2.0 (with Nfuse 1.8). I spent some time with the CSG guys and their new
feature set, primarily double DMZ support where 2 CSG servers work in series
between the client and the farm to provide extra security. I also got to
speak to one of the main MFXP developers about printing and my issues with
FR2 direct printing and the hotfix I had obtained. A little has changed in
FR3 printing but a lot of changes will go in the next release of Metaframe
including policies by IP address, for me personally I then will be able to
client map our 4 printers in our London office subnet to our London users
group in AD over our slow link from the Sydney farm and all my problems are
solved. The hard part will be the wait for the next release of Metaframe
after FR3.
Project Pearl is a User collaboration tool that Citrix has developed. It
works with meetings scheduled in outlook and allows multiple users to all
work in a session on the same documents. Essentially its is a front end GUI
and scripts to easily use many to one shadowing. Being very early in the
product design the developers took many ideas from the attendees of the
session which included keyboard and mouse baton passing on the fly and
eventually voice enabled conferences. The first tech preview will be
available in mid November from www.mycitrix.com
Nfuse 1.8 is bringing the Project Columbia and Project Williamette Features
back into Nfuse itself. Multiple farm support, NDS and RSA tokens to name a
few.
FR3 isn't packed with big features like FR2 but is packed with lots of
subtle changes to make life easier, a lot more work has been done on the CMC
to make it a bit more user friendly, less tabs to click thru, item counters,
the ability to launch a desktop session by right clicking a server to name
just 3. The main Feature being the Universal Print Driver 2 which now
supports color and 600dpi using the HP LaserJet 4500 pcl5c driver which is
native to windows 2000. Resource manager now supports smtp mail addresses
along with numerous fixes and reporting changes.
The preview release of the 7.3.xxx clients were showcased, the full client
now features Windows XP themes to more fully integrate seamless Windows,
Clientname is now dynamic in the registry to help with SOE builds, long with
enhancements to auto client reconnect, 2 versions of the full client seem to
be being developed, a thin wire client with a smaller footprint to allow
basic connections alongside a fully featured client with all the features
built-in. The new Java client now features session sharing and seamless
windows and Server to client content redirection, bringing it further into
line with the WFICA based clients. As a heavy user of the Java client from
behind the firewalls of up to 50 client companies all on differing
infrastructure, I know my users will get a much more pleasant experience.
Speed Screen Browser Acceleration has been developed for Outlook, Outlook
Express and IE to allow better Jpeg compression and screen scrolling
refresh. Currently with e 6.3.xxx client when a user scrolls in IE each
block of the session must be redownloaded wasting bandwidth and causing
screen delays on slow connections. The new clients use background image
delivery for faster user response.
I already have CSG installed and running in a full redundant environment,
but attended the session on "Citrix Secure Gateway Troubleshooting" 95% of
the session was on the install process with 50% of that on certificates, a
better title for the session should have included the words "Installation
Steps." The session itself was very good if you didn't already have the
product running but with a show of hands at the start if the session at
least a third of the attendees already were using CSG. The only useful new
information I got was KB article CTX052061 "CSG Debug tool" The only vendor
session I attended was "Terminal Services in .NET". Two new TS features are
console redirection and application security ala appsec. Other than that
Microsoft are still along way behind Citrix and admitted they will always be
in that position.
The main "Exhibit Hall" was open for the 3 days of the conference, with
Citrix along with many vendors showing their latest products. I got a chance
to meet up with the RTO software guys having dealt with them via email and
phone for the past few months. Wyse and HP setup thin client rooms for
attendees to connect back to work to check mail etc, the only problem being
that they wouldn't work with CSG, quite embarrassing for Citrix as they are
pushing it as "anywhere, anytime any device" ,(except Iforum)
Overall the event was very well organized and ran smoothly, I met up with
many people from the thin.net as well as making new contacts, most of which
was at the Lobby Bar in the evenings. Networking is a big part of every
conference.
Last came the closing party over at Walt Disney World, rides, food, drinks,
rides and finally Mark Templeton arrived with Cinderella in a horse drawn
coach to close iForum 2002 and setoff the fireworks display.
Hopefully I'll make the long journey to iForum 2003
John Rowlandson
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