by Nicolas Ignoto, CTP, NY Metro CUGC Leader

Recap of the second Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) XL event in New York City. Hosted at the Microsoft Technology Center on June 25, 2019.

Northeast CUGC XL: Second Edition

The second annual Northeast CUGC XL was held at the end of June in New York City. This all-day, free event was hosted at Microsoft Technology Center in Midtown and was co-organized by the New York Metro, New Jersey and Connecticut/RI CUGC local groups. We were excited to once again bring together IT professionals from many different locations. The XL events are usually the biggest of the year for local CUGC groups, and this time was no different, as about 200 attendees, vendors, and partners were present for this exceptional day. 

Featured Speakers

We put together an all-star lineup for this event with many experienced speakers including:

• Our host for the day, Paul Stansel (@pstansel), Conn/RI CUGC Leader, Director at Presidio and Citrix Technology Professional
• Patrick Coble (@VDIHacker), Independent Security Architect and Citrix Technology Professional 
• Dan Feller (@djfeller), Lead Architect at Citrix and Citrix Technology Advocate
• Jarian Gibson (@jariangibson), Sr. Solutions Architect at Nutanix and Citrix Technology Professional
• Peter Prose (@peterprose), Lead Domain Specialist, Pre-sales at Citrix and former Sapho employee
• Nicolas Ignoto (@citrixguru), NY CUGC Leader, IT Architect and Citrix Technology Professional

Great Location

We were fortunate to once again for Microsoft to welcome us to the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in the heart of Midtown. The MTC is a top-notch location and beautiful space, and we were both grateful and fortunate to use it as our event hub. 

The Ins and Outs of NorthEast XL 2019 

We started the day with a generous breakfast to give our attendees time to dry off (pouring rain greeted us in New York City that day). 

Paul Stansel did such a great job last year hosting the event that we asked him to do it again this year. Paul kicked off the day by announcing the schedule and by providing the latest updates from CUGC. Our sponsors were given 15-minute slots throughout the day to talk about their products in between the 45-minute sessions from our main speakers. 

Paul barely had a moment to put the mic down that morning, and it was soon time for his session. This year I was fortunate to co-present with him about Citrix Cloud. Together, we talked about some of the great things about Citrix Cloud, as well as some of its  challenges, like traffic routing limitations, the considerations regarding authentication mechanisms supported, and the challenges with workloads hosted in Microsoft Azure.

Next was Franco Augustin from Nutanix (our one of our sponsors at XL), who talked about how Citrix and Nutanix are better together. Nutanix always offers great support for our CUGC local meeting and it was great having them again for this event. 

Next up was Dan Feller from Citrix, who talked about passwords and identities in Citrix Workspace. Dan was here last year for the first Northeast XL and his presentation was once again a hit with our attendees. 

John Worthington, Director of Customer Success at eG Innovations, was the next presenter to show the value of eG products for Citrix deployments. 

Then it was the first break of the day. Our attendees were invited to have a drink and a bite to eat while networking together. They were also asked to work on completing their CUGC Passports document to be eligible for prizes at the end of the day meet-up with our sponsors.

After the small break, IGEL showed how its company is disrupting the industry. 

The third major session of the day was about a topic that was announced at Citrix Synergy 2019: Intelligent Experience for Citrix Workspace. Peter Prose, a former Sapho employee who joined Citrix during the acquisition, talked about workflow integrations in Citrix Workspace, Microapps, and the Future of Work. The integration of Sapho capabilities in Citrix Workspace is much anticipated by customers and it was great to have a sneak peek of the new features coming soon for Workspace.

Just before lunch was Tricerat’s opportunity to dive in printing cost optimization for Citrix solutions. 

The afternoon kicked off with Matt Boyajian from Liquidware who had the difficult task to keep everyone with a happy belly awake. Matt talked about application virtualization with Liquidware FlexApp and showed the advantages of his product compared to Citrix App Layering. 

Next on stage was CTP Jarian Gibson who talked about Office 365 and profile management in Citrix environments.

Arthur Hitomi, President, Chief Executive Officer & co-founder of Numecent soon followed  to show how his company can help customers with optimized application packaging for cloud or on-premises deployments.

Next, CTP Patrick Coble stepped on to talk about how to secure Citrix ADC deployments. Patrick also demonstrated that it is possible to drive at 150mph on a German autobahn and take screenshots (don’t try this at home!). Our attendees left Patrick’s session with some useful tips to secure their online presence, such as registering with different email addresses for banking and online shopping.

Just before beer o’clock was PrinterLogic’s slot to talk about printing. While a seemingly tough challenge, it was a  successful session from by Jason Klein, who showed our attendees how to improve Citrix printing infrastructure with PinterLogic products.

Then it was time to open the bar — and our speaker panel! After a short break for snacks and beer, all our speakers sat down and we opened the mic to our attendees for 30 minutes of unfiltered talks. No topic was left unturned. As a speaker, I took part in that discussion and we did not escape the usual questions about LTSR/CR programs from Citrix. This topic remains very popular within the community since they have been introduced by the company. 

So many prizes!

The last part of the day was dedicated to raffle prizes, where NY CUGC Leader, James Ma had the pleasure to hand over many great prizes including an Amazon Echo, Sonos Play One, Atari Gold Flashback 9, PlayStation Classic,  SNES Classic Mini, NES Classic Edition and Amazon gift cards.

NorthEast peeps

Below are the people who worked hard to make this event a success. All of these people are truly passionate and we are fortunate to have them involved in our Citrix User Group Community!

Thank you all!

The second edition of the Citrix User Group Community XL event in the New York City area was a great success with an active and enthusiastic crowd. Presentations from all of our speakers were both enlightening and informative.

I’d like to thank all the people involved in organizing this event including CUGC HQ, George Abar, Katie Heidkamp, Stephanie Boozer, Kimberly Ruggero, Jennifer Gibbons, Brad Hornback, our speakers, all local group leaders and Citrix employees. Your hard work made this event both possible and a tremendous success.

Also, big thumbs up to all our sponsors: eG Innovations, IGEL, Liquidware, PrinterLogic, ControlUp, Nutanix, Tricerat, and Numecent. I also would like to thank Citrix and Microsoft for their support.

And last but not least, a big thanks to our members who participated in this event. A lot of attendees were there last year as well, which shows that our events are well-received and our members enjoy attending larger events. Some members drove or took public transportation for long hours to be with us;we are truly fortunate to have such amazing members. Citrix User Group Communities are made by the users, for the users, and we hope you enjoyed this event as much as we did.