This was the first physical event that has been hosted since the merger of the UK AVD and UK Citrix User Groups to create this new community focusing on End User Computing (EUC). Its a community event that focuses on knowledge sharing, findings and insights as opposed to product pitch following product pitch.
Whilst there were certainly a lot more than 5 takeaways from the event (no offence to those speakers not included) here are the things that stood out to me:-
1) Microsoft launches W365 Frontline
W365 Frontline has been announced by Microsoft more information can be found here. In simple terms, Microsoft have introduced a flexible Cloud PC licenses that can be shared between 3 people. It aims to serve a group of users that often get overlooked, "frontline" workers, that may used shared workspaces, travel between sites or are simply part-time resources. This should make the per user, per month license model more palatable for W365/Cloud PC in these use cases.
2) Nerdio extends management capability to Intune
Okay, I already knew this. But Vadim spoke about Nerdio's roadmap to include both Intune management and orchestration and of course application management which are valuable additions to the product. I'm excited about what happens next with advisor too; the cost modelling capability is very good but the concept of dynamic optimisation recommendations (as a managed service provider) is very positive.
3) You cannot continue to kick the can down the road unsupported Operating Systems & Applications
The problem of Applications (and just knowing what you have in the first place) was a key theme throughout the day. Nigel Woods and Steve Horne of appCure presented some worrying statistics regarding the number of on net desktops, staggeringly more than 5% of global desktops are running unsupported Windows OS's.
They shared details of the new EU legislation which I think relates to this that will put responsibility onto software and hardware vendors when it comes to their updates / version releases following the increase of supply chain attacks.
This problem extends into applications. They showed a slide showing the volume of apps in the marketplace, by there calculation 6,125,000,000,000,000 apps in circulation.
The point here is, we need to stop burying our heads in the sand when it comes to outdated operating systems and applications as the problem will only get worse.
4) The Modern Workplace requires Modern Management
Andreas van Wingerden from Liquidware discussed the challenges of re-thinking modern management to align with the progress thats been made with the modern workspace. Its not sustainable to manage and maintain different delivery platforms, app types and management consoles and expect it to scale or even work reliably.
5) You can secure your AVD environment with native tools.
Neil at Nerdio presented his approach to hardening Nerdio / AVD using native capability here.
His colleague Bas has written a really comprehensive cheat sheet/guidance around security which you can find here
Notable shout outs to the Go-EUC guys, they did a brilliant presentation on their testing of Teams offload across Cloud PC, AVD and Citrix. This looks like a great resource and a good bunch of guys that I highly recommend you follow - https://www.go-euc.com/
About the Author: Mike Starnes
Mike has worked in the IT Industry for over 20 years. If he's not talking technology, he'll be reading, playing football or trying to embarrass his daughters.
