by Ronnie Hamilton, CTA, Ireland CUGC Leader

This year has totally flown by. Can you believe that the Q3 meeting for CUGC in Ireland has already completed? I usually write a brief overview of the day’s antics over on ronnie.ie but this one is going out out on CUGC to see if we can reach some more Citrix community fans and to find out if they like what they see. Hopefully, they can come along and join in the fun.

We were back to our usual venue, the Radisson Blu in Dame Lane, Dublin in a slightly larger room downstairs. I still prefer the sky suite on top of the hotel, which does have fabulous views of the city. It’s a nice spot to have a few drinks and catch up with everyone after the event.

Looking at our Agenda, we had a last minute change from advertised and it was looking like I would fill in at the end with a last minute Citrix Analytics session. But, due to some changes in running order on the day-of, and some of the speakers running a little longer on their topics (after speaking to Martin earlier, I new he could go a bit longer and after making the trip across from Florida it made sense to let him share some of his vast knowledge with us), there ended up being not enough time.

To kick things off, we had Conor Burke form Citrix support. It’s always good to get the insights from the escalation engineers who are dealing with some of the more complex issues arriving on a day-to-day basis in Citrix. He gave an update on how support works, from the structure to how to open calls to some of the processes behind it. Leading on to some reviews of the top cases topics of recent months, including everyone’s bug bear of slow logons, an issue where in VMware the disk image file is not deleted after a catalog update, and SSON issues. He called out support’s process on how to troubleshoot these issues and how they came to their conclusions and ultimately, fixes.

Next, in a slight change of running order, we had Rory Monaghan (CTP) deliver the sponsor session for PolicyPak. Being the tech wizard and seasoned presenter that he is, he delivered a great overview of the power of PolicyPak, highlighting its many features in some very powerful live demos.  

I would like to thank PolicyPak for sponsoring our event this time round, unfortunately no one from PolicyPak was able to attend as they are mainly based in the US, but in Rory they had the perfect man to deliver the presentation.

Speaking to everyone after there was a buzz about what PolicyPak could do for them on their environments so hope if you were interested you headed over to the website https://www.policypak.com/ and downloaded the trial and had a play about in your lab.

Next up after coffee break, we had Guy Leech (Sysinternals – PowerShell Junkie) with his “Troubleshooting Windows with PowerShell.” A programmer for more years than I’ve been in IT (and I remember Y2K ….), from writing drivers in the early days to consulting on the tricky projects for Government departments, he still finds time to consult on the automated actions in ControlUp.

If you’re troubleshooting which rogue process is holding up login times or need a script to do something, Guy will have a few lines of PowerShell code that can help. If you’re into PowerShell and don’t follow this man on Twitter, you are certainly missing out, as he uses it as a repository of commands and it’s an easy way to look back with a simple Twitter search to find some gems.

Having seen one of his sessions at a UK user group last year, I knew what to expect and it didn’t disappoint, pretty much straight into live demos showing how easy it is to troubleshoot complex issues with a few lines of code (if you know where to look that is, as he seemed to be searching 100s of windows logs, some of which I didn’t even know existed).

Watch this space as he may have to make a return to give the Irish audience a deep dive in the SysInternals stuff link Process monitor.

To finish off the day we had Martin Zugec, who should need no introduction to CUGC members. He is responsible for bringing up the Citrix Optimizer from a community project to a full part of the Citrix ecosystem.

If you’re not running it in your environment you should definitely take a look. His latest project in Citrix has been to bring us TechZone–documentation written by techies for techies–no marketing here, just how it is, when to use, and proper deep dives. Take a look here TechZone.

Martin’s session was on the Citrix Optimizer and lessons learned from the field. He was working with Citrix Consulting, covering the Middle East and had some interesting stories from the field and how the idea for Optimizer came about till its inception.

Calling out all who helped along the way and who still do, in fact we had Dennis Span present here last year, who is heavily involved in some of the pre-defined templates, it also ties in nicely with Matthias Schlimm’s BISF image sealing script who presented in Dublin last year. 

Martin gave some figures on why you would want to run the optimizer over not running it, and it just makes sense. Citrix are looking at how they would implement it as part of the VDA and it will have a part in the new Citrix Managed Desktop pre-defined image.

Then as time got away from us, it was time to retire downstairs to continue the discussions over some well-earned refreshments and food. It was great to have the caliber of speakers of the day give up their time to support our event. 

And that’s wrap for Q3! We already have Q4 planning in the works, without giving too much away, keep 28th November free. Google will be hosting us in their offices in the center of Dublin. Keep an eye on social media or follow me on @ronnieDOTie for updates.

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