by Lee West, Kansas City Metro CUGC Leader
On April 4th, 2019, the Kansas City, Central Iowa, and Omaha Citrix user groups came together to host the Great Plains XL Citrix User Group event at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. It was a very informative, day-long conference with a great turnout. The facilities at Arrowhead were nice and food and drinks were tasty. Special thanks go out to the Omaha group, who endured a longer bus ride than normal due to some of the recent flooding.
We had several great presentations throughout the day. Our first presenter was Citrix Senior Architect Martin Zugec (@MartinZugec), creator of the Citrix Optimizer, who gave a great presentation on Best Practices for Optimizing your VDI and RDS environments. I would certainly recommend checking out some of his blog posts at https://www.citrix.com/blogs/author/martinz1/.
Next, we heard from CT-RI CUGC Leader & CTP Paul Stansel (@pstansel). A recognized leader in the industry, Paul gave an excellent presentation about Citrix Cloud migrations and the successes and challenges surrounding them. Paul’s presentation outlined some of the great things about Citrix Cloud, as well as some things that could be improved. Be sure to check out more from Paul at http://citrixtips.com.
Our third presentation was by CUGC Networking Leader & CTP Dave Brett (@dbretty) who talked about nFactor authentication on Citrix ADC (NetScaler if you are still stuck on the old names). Dave demonstrated several scenarios where authentication decisions could be made depending on information the user provided during the login process. I personally found this very interesting and would love to implement some of this in the environment I support.
Next, we broke for lunch with some outstanding Kansas City BBQ. This was a great time to walk about and visit with our event sponsors: Nutanix, Bitdefender, ControlUp, eG Innovations, Ivanti, Liquidware, PolicyPak, and PrinterLogic. Each vendor also gave a seven-minute presentation in between speakers. We appreciate their support, and this event would not have been possible without them.
The afternoon session kicked off with South Florida CUGC Leader & CTP Shane Kleinert (@shanekleinert). Shane gave a very entertaining presentation titled “Changing Course for the Future – Citrix Workspace: A Real World Example.” Shane described many of the benefits of using Citrix Workspace in your environment. He gave examples of using Workspace integration with SaaS apps and Secure Browser along with many other great use cases for migrating to Citrix Cloud and Workspace.
Our last presentation of the day was one of my favorites for sure. Nashville CUGC Leader & CTP Patrick Coble (@VDIHacker) gave a great presentation on ADC Security. He offered several examples of things you can do to increase security in your ADC environment. Some of the highlights included using geo-location to block IP’s from certain countries, IP reputation, App Firewall and preventing DDoS attacks, along with several other best practices. If you have never heard Patrick talk I would highly recommend it.
We ended the day with several groups of Round Table discussions and most importantly PRIZES!!! This was my first Citrix XL event, and I thought it went very well. We had some truly great presentations from industry leaders. Thanks to everyone for attending and we look forward to seeing you next year!
