by Nick Burton, Indianapolis CUGC Leader

A bigger CUGC Meeting – In the Midwest!

CUGC XL Midwest was a collaborative effort between CUGC HQ and the five nearby local groups: Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Northern Indiana. This day-long event was made possible due to the hard work of everyone and the support of our sponsors:

The Speakers

Our speakers consisted of five highly-renowned Citrix gurus, including Citrix employees, CTAs and CTPs, covering a wide variety of popular subjects:

• Eduardo Molina, CTP, Cincinnati CUGC Leader – “Citrix Cloud with XenApp/Xendesktop on Azure/AWS”
• Jarian Gibson, CTP, Kansas City CUGC Leader – “Citrix and Office 365”
• Jacob Rutski, CTA – “NetScaler and Authentication Deep Dive”
• Ryan Revord, CTP, Omaha CUGC Leader – “Keeping the Lights On! Tips & Tricks for Keeping Your Environment Healthy”
• Martin Zugec, CTA – “Ransomware Kill Chain”

The Event

At 8AM, the fun began! Customers, partners, and Citrix employees all started their venture into Lucas Oil Stadium to register for the event. After registration, attendees were guided beyond the doors into the spectacular venue to fuel up for breakfast and grab a seat. At 8:45, Benjaman Crill, Northern Indiana CUGC Leader, welcomed everyone and introduced himself as the emcee for the event.

The event kicked off with PolicyPak, a company that focuses on simplifying even the most complex group policy and compliance challenges for enterprise.

Next, Jarian Gibson spoke about Citrix and Office 365. For anyone who works with integrating Office 365 into their XenApp and XenDesktop environments, you know that this can be a huge challenge. Jarian did an excellent job providing tips and tricks for integrating your Citrix environment with Office 365 while maintaining a positive user experience. 

Liquidware then spoke about their methods to effectively manage any Windows workspace with environment management, application layering, and desktop monitoring.

After a brief break, Jake Rutski then spoke about NetScaler; specifically on how NetScaler can provide single sign-on while using nFactor to dynamically adjust the user’s authentication methods. Jake did a great job walking us through the various SSO and contextual authentication scenarios with a live demo.

Next, Tricerat took the stage and talked about their serverless print management solution.

Afterward, Eduardo Molina spoke on Citrix Cloud with Citrix App and Citrix Desktop, hosted on Azure and AWS. Not only can you eliminate the control layer of your Citrix environment, but you can take it to the next level by hosting your compute resources in the cloud. Even if you currently use Citrix Cloud for your on-premises hosting, you can easily expand into AWS or Azure with a few clicks. 

IGEL then took the stage and talked about their software-driven thin client solution and how they are revolutionizing the traditional thin client. 

Following IGEL’s presentation, Benjamin made the announcement for lunch. Immediately after, attendees sat around various roundtables and talked about hot topics in the industry today. Topics included Windows, Workspace App, Security, Office 365, WEM, and more! There were lots of great discussions with each of our speakers leading the table topics around the room. 

After the round table discussions concluded, ControlUP took the stage. ControlUp provided a demo and displayed how they can help companies proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve poor user experience through a single pane of glass.

Over the past several years, security has transformed the way that we think about IT. Martin Zugec discussed how attackers are thinking when it comes to designing ransomware, as well as methods to stay ahead of them. Martin discussed various design scenarios, including deploying NetScaler as a Web Application Firewall and using Linux-based session hosts in the DMZ to deliver users’ mail client via Citrix App.

After everyone considered running home to update their router’s firmware (ha!), FSLogix stepped up to discuss how they are leading the pack when it comes to app layering and integrating with Office 365.

After our final break, Nutanix talked about how they lead the hyperconverged industry with their scalable appliances and their very own hypervisor, Acropolis.

Ryan Revord took the speakers across the finish line as he discussed some tips and tricks to keeping a Citrix environment healthy. Not only did Ryan talk about some things that aren’t so obvious, such as putting mandatory profiles on the image versus a network share, he also talked about creating recurring reminders on various schedules (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) to ensure we are not forgetting about the obvious “keep the lights on” tasks.

Finally, we wrapped up the event with some cold brews and an open discussion with our speaker panel. The speakers covered many different topics as the attendees participated with them. Once the panel was concluded, we raffled the main prizes, which consisted of Amazon gift cards, Sonos ONE speakers, and a Yeti cooler!

Overall, the CUGC XL Midwest was a fantastic event with a great turnout. I would like to thank our sponsors, the CUGC members who attended, all of the folks from CUGC HQ, and all of the Midwest CUGC leaders that contributed to help make the event such a success. It was amazing to see all of the synergy from the leaders every week over the past several months, and seeing all of the hard work finally come to fruition.