The annual MVP conference at Microsoft's campus is Redmond is a great opportunity for the twenty-or-so Terminal Server MVPs to spend a few days with Microsoft's Terminal Server product group. While most of the conversations are NDA, one cool thing...

Large software suppliers are so focused on the management and maintenance of ICT systems that they tend to forget the other important half, the user side, of this management. Users would like to have a simple, uniform, fast and reliable workspace environment. Administrators would like to be able to manage this Windows workspace centrally, regardless of whether it is a physical or virtual workplace, implemented locally or centrally and whether the Windows applications are installed, streamed or virtualised. In many organisations the term ‘user workspace management’ is still relatively unknown. When the organisation understands the meaning of user workspace management and sees the opportunities and benefits this provides to the users and the IT organisation, the customer, in my experience, is often surprised that this solution has not been applied earlier. Customers who use user workspace solutions reap the benefits of this and never want to go back again! ...

NOTE: This post was written in April 2008. In November 2008, The Brian Madden Company was acquired by TechTarget. TechTarget is just a larger version of The Brian Madden Company. So now we're 600 employees instead of six employees, but we're still 100...

Haven't had a video yet this week, so I was looking through them and found this video from Kevin Goodman and Michael Thomason. It's entitled "Scriptable Virtual Channels," and it covers how to create your own virtual channel for Citrix...

Everyone is familiar with the concept of seamless windows, where only a remote application's window is visible on the client instead of the entire remote desktop. "Reverse seamless" is the flip-side of that concept. It's when a client device uses a full-screen remote windows desktop, but then individual LOCAL applications running on the client "poke through" the remote window to appear as individual applications within the remote desktop session.

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A look at Application Service Provider Market and how hosted desktops (VDI) might augment or replace Terminal Services there....

I'm at the MVP Summit this week. I was eating lunch the other day with Steve Greenberg, Benny Tritsch, and Tim Mangan. We got to talking about how all these "application frameworks" (Java, .NET Framework, Silverlight, etc.) have to load in every user session on a Terminal Server and how slow that is....

For this week's BriForum video, we thought we'd do a 2-for-1 special. In Chicago last year, Joe Shonk put on an excellent 2-part presentation called "Automated Installs." In the first session, Joe gives a beginner to intermediate presentation...

PortICA is the name of the technology that "ports" the ICA protocol stack from Presentation Server / Terminal Server to a workstation OS. In other words, portICA lets you use the ICA protocol to connect to a Windows XP or Vista host acting as the server (for a VDI or blade PC scenario). Citrix is using PortICA instead of the built-in RDP-based remote desktop option in their upcoming XenDesktop product....

The markets are buzzing today on the rumor (here and here, for example), that either IBM or Cisco might try to buy Citrix. Of course the world is full of rumors, but there's at least anecdotal evidence that people are listening to this one as Citrix's stock moved up about 7% today, which is the biggest single-day move they've had in a while. (Although half-way through the day the stock has dropped about half that new value.)...