It was my pleasure on 18th March to present again as a non-dutch representative (along with Andrew Morgan and Jarian Gibson) to the Dutch Citrix User Group. You may have read this on-line elsewhere – but this one is special and has specific content to the CUGC 🙂
The Citrix User Group Community is an accepting and inviting bunch. There has been an explosion of new groups in the past 6-8 months as the community gathers speed. This is the second time I’ve presented to the Dutch Citrix User Group. I was very pleased to be given the opportunity to speak again. This time there was 100% more content in Dutch than there was last time 🙂
My session was Citrix Lifecycle Management: The Toddler Years which talked through CLM, its place in Citrix Workspace Cloud, what you can do with it; how I’d put together the blueprint to automatically deploy an Atlantis USX instance of software defined storage (so used CLM to deploy Linux based services, not just Windows). I also talked about what I’d like to see improved… and how I thought it would benefit more in exciting new users from being free.
From feedback, it was useful, some of that “for free” sparked some debate – which is cool.
When you’re presenting it’s useful to listen and learn from the audience. I learned :
- the Dutch for toddler (dreumes);
- the Netherlands also has Ben and Holly;
- hardly a sole had moved to a form of Cloud Services (or would at least admit to it);
- the audience typically supported +500 user Citrix installs (and there were a lot of them);
- that many didn’t have automated processes in place; but if they did they were very likely using RES One.
All in all, those last points were most interesting; there may be much marketing on “move to the cloud” and services available – but many remain (at least in the Netherlands) to be convinced. I think CLM has the capability to be one of those outrider applications/services that help make that move gain speed.
Many thanks to all who attended and contributed to make it the great set of sessions it was. Yet again, my compliments to the DuCUG steering group for putting on such a professional event – splendid to see, fun to attend. I thank you for the pickup and arranging drop off service (which got *very exciting* at one point). As I’ve said before, I look forward to further collaboration in the future. I do hope to get there again, and wouldn’t hesitate in recommending you keep tabs on their future events, and attend (or present) if you can.
If, like me you’re not a native Dutch speaker, I could suggest learning Dutch to get the most out of the majority of session. Perhaps that’s a difficulty for European Synergy events: speaking in public is daunting, it is easier to articulate your point in your native language. That said, I could follow, there was intriguing content there on session monitoring, project delivery, IoT and new features Citrix is delivering. I look forward to reading about/seeing those in the future. That may put you off going, but the simplest way to get round that is to have a chat with people at the breaks and get their thoughts on the topics – everyone was very friendly and the conversations were excellent and helpfully for me, in English 🙂
And here’s an interesting thing, during the inevitable twitter back and fro going on during the event there was the suggestion that, given proximty of countries in Europe its easier to share presenters. True, for me not that far (about 3 hours) neither for AndrewM (about the same if he hadn’t given off criminal vibes) – but Jarian travelled from the US and *one* of his legs was 7 hours :O. At the UK Citrix user group we’ve had French, Dutch, and German speakers – we’ve done remote sessions to guest speakers in the US. Anything is possible.
I’d always encourage new speakers from within the group “Bring Your Own Session” – be it 10-15-20 minutes long; share and learn. At the same time, don’t be afraid to reach out to the wider CUGC to bring in other ideas and alternative views.
What we’ve also found in the UK, is Citrix themselves are very keen to attend. We’ve had informative presentations from product mananagers, SEs, product testing teams. As you can see from one of our previous UK Citrix User Group events – this can lead to a useful interaction at Citrix offices. That’s the sort of interaction that helps drive better product.
Hopefully see you at the Citrix UK User Group on 27th April 2016 in Edinburgh, where I may well be mostly hoping that all of the excellent presenters turn up, and nothing goes wrong.