by Brandon Mitchell

Cincinnati–home of the Reds, Skyline Chili and my adopted hometown–hosted the Second Annual Midwest XL. The Great American Ballpark, located off the mighty banks of the Ohio River, serves as the home of the Cincinnati Reds (baseball’s first professional team) and the now-legendary Midwest XL. The event brought together attendees from Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Northern Indiana CUGC local groups.

Now a word from our sponsors–Citrix, Bitdefender, ControlUp, eG Innovations, IGEL, Liquidware, Numecent, Nutanix, and Pivot3–without whom this day would not have been possible. Thanks for your support! 

If you’ve ever attended Citrix Synergy, you know that some of the best presentations are those by our expert community of CTPs and CTAs. We were lucky enough to have some of the best of the best present. Eduardo Molina, CTP @molikop served as our master of ceremonies and guided us through our day, which included the following sessions:

• Shane Kleinert, CTP and Dance Master @shanekleinert, presented “Changing Course for the future–Citrix Workspace. A Real World View,” giving expert insight on Citrix Workspace and the future of Citrix and showing off his viral signature dance moves.
• Benjamin Crill, CTA @benjamincrill and Scott Bowling, CUGC Leader @VTScott, presented “American Electric Power: Top Use Cases are on the Board,” giving real-world use cases of Citrix technologies and a quick game of Family Feud.
• Daniel Feller, CTA presented “Show me your ID,” talking about password and identities in Citrix Workspace and sadly, limited his presentation to only one Chuck Norris slide this time.
• Patrick Coble, CTP @VDIHacker, presented “Security War Stories,” talking about physically securing the workspace and his experiences with ethical hacking while detouring into his adventures on the German Autobahn. (Insert Ricky Bobby joke here.)
• Steve Greenberg, CTP Fellow @stevegreenberg, presented “EUC: Choose Your Own Adventure,” where attendees were able to choose the direction of the presentation into topics like Cloud and the future of the hypervisor.

Attendees were able to engage in open, small-group discussions and had the opportunity to interact with experts and peers on various topics including security, Office 365, Workspace Experience, Networking, Endpoint Management, Image Management, and general End User Computing.

We finished up the day with a prize drawing for all attendees who completed their passports by collecting a stamp from each sponsor, as well as another prize drawing for any attendees who followed CUGC on Twitter or tweeted out pictures throughout the day.

Thanks to all of our local leaders: Benjamin Crill, Brandon Mitchell, Chad King, David Prows, Dwayne Dunivan, Eduardo Molina, Gregory Barker, Scott Bowling, Steve Breitenstein and our Citrix SE’s for volunteering their time planning and promoting.

Let’s not to forget to thank Jennifer Gibbons, Brad Hornback, and Kimberly Ruggero for making the trek to Cincinnati to make the event such a success.

We all look forward to doing this again next year!