by Scott Banewski, Houston CUGC Leader

On February 26, the Austin, Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth CUGC groups came together for the first CUGC XL event of 2020 at Space Center Houston. It was a great day in an epic location, packed with learning and networking, as CUGC members from around Texas gathered together to hear from five awesome speakers:

“EUC Choose Your Own Adventure”
Steve Greenberg, CTP Fellow
This was an open-ended discussion driven by choices from the audience. The way questions were asked and answered made it feel as if it was truly a community of users.

“Driving Modern Passwordless Authentication with Citrix Workspace and Microsoft Azure Active Directory”
Jason Samuel, CTP and Houston CUGC Leader
This was very interesting and indeed, it is the future. Even afterward, the questions kept coming!

“LTSR vs. CR…The Great Debate Continues!”
Nick Rintalan, Citrix
It was surprising to me, how close the percentage of support cases for LTSR vs. CR were!

“Performance Analytics”
Ron Oglesby, Citrix
According to Citrix SE Kevin Scott, “Ron is always entertaining and very smart. He knows how to grab the audience attention.” Judging by the interaction around the room, I’d definitely agree.

“Privileged Account Management 101”
Patrick Coble, CTP 
“Learning about the website dehashed.com” was Austin CUGC leader Jason Willis’ favorite tip of the day.

We finished off the day with roundtable discussions and happy hour, where the conversations kept going. Asked what was his most memorable part of the day, Jason Samuel said, “ALL OF IT! We had a Space Shuttle next to us! The content was great and talking with groups of people during the roundtables was probably my favorite part.” For my part, I really enjoyed the venue and the food, and talking with people from other local groups

But what did the attendees think? From the surveys and activity on Twitter, it seems they had a great time, and enjoyed the content and networking:

“Amazing venue. It is the most epic and historical location CUGC has ever had!”

“Awesome mix of so much knowledge. From high level trends but tons of practical technical of information.”

“This CUGC XL was a very good investment of our time. The top 5 speakers were awesome, and very entertaining. The information shared was priceless! Thanks for hosting/delivering this very important event.”

“Great networking experience and knowledge transfer.”

“Good crowd, great content, balance from vendors.”

#mycugc #CUGCXL .
Great event…lots of knowledge sharing and experience from the Citrix Experts.
You get chance to meet Citrix bloggers/experts and learn about modern cloud technologies and toolset to resolve your day to day operational issues. pic.twitter.com/hauJLDAWXD — Arun Shringi (@ArunShringi2) February 26, 2020

And of course, we couldn’t have pulled any of this off without the support of our awesome sponsors! Big thanks to Citrix, 10Zig, ControlUp, Conversant Group, IGEL, Liquidware, Numecent and Nutanix!