Last week was the annual Citrix Synergy event in Orlando Florida. This year was a little different with Citrix offering instructor-led learning labs prior to the start of the conference on Sunday and Monday.  I opted to attend three on Monday, each of them being about  three hours in length and very interesting. The labs I attended included:

By Randy Becker, Enterprise Architect, Solutions Here is the second part of my blog series providing a recap of Citrix Synergy 2014. If you missed part one, you can find it here. Enjoy!

By Randy Becker, Enterprise Architect, Solutions   Citrix Synergy was held this past week in Anaheim California, and as always it was a great event.  For those of you who could not attend, I will provide a recap of the week’s events in a two part blog series. 

By Randy Becker, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne Citrix held its most important event of the year for customers and partners at the end of May. I have been attending these events for many years and this had to be the largest attendance I have ever seen. I was told that 60% were first-time attendees. There was plenty of excitement, and those of you who know Mark Templeton know that he tied in great classic rock to the event. The theme was “Going Mobile,” and what else to lead things off but The Who’s classic “Going Mobile.”

This is one of those old woodworking adages that really applies when you are starting the process to build out your own private cloud. What does this mean and how does it apply today? Well, I can remember all too well my junior high school shop teacher repeating this over and over again to us as students. I think he told us measure twice, cut once almost as many times as he told us to remember to take the key out of the chuck in the drill press or to stop drag racing with the belt sanders. I can also remember telling my shop teacher it was a whole lot more fun to crank up the table saw and start cutting than to use a tape measure.

  The complexity associated with patching, service packs, hotfixes, upgrades and firmware updates, defined as general life cycle activities, are nothing new to IT professionals. This has been an ongoing effort for many years now, and we have all come to expect that vendors will provide regular updates that include bug fixes, security patches and feature enhancements.  We have all experienced that common call to technical support to be greeted by the phrase: “are you running the most recent updates?”  While the cloud doesn’t change the need for these updates; it can, however, substantially simplify the process and reduce planned downtime..