April 2008 - Brian Madden Brian Madden

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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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....

Citrix is a big company with dozens (hundreds?) of groups, teams, divisions, and sections. One such group is the "Advanced Products Group," (or "AdProd" as they're known internally). AdProd's goal is to research, innovate, and incubate emerging and disruptive technologies. They're typically looking into the future about two years ahead of the product groups, which means that AdProd folks are generally thinking about things that are four or five years away from being part of an actual Citrix product....