Mobius Strip Conjecture

Streams. Streams. Sleep on a bed of streams.

Hmmm.  Streams.

So everyone knows about the AppV streaming applications to your doorstep.  Not many people know that Citrix has been able to do this long before AppV was snaffled up by the King of Snaffling, Microsoft.

Yes.  Citrix can stream applications - IIRC this has been possible since Presentation Server 4.  To do this you needed a seperate client called the offline client.  You also needed an online client to access all your online - or standard Citrix applications.  Pretty nasty. 

This then turned into one client called Receiver were you could extend the power of Receiver with plugins.

Again still not very nice as now Citrix has dained to drop support of GPO deployment, reading the next sentence you can see why...  So now we have an agent which is supported on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Blackberry however we have no reliable - read single, method of deploying it!

"Oh yes there is."

Ok you knew that was coming.

Merchandising server.  This is a virtual appliance which once setup can manage and deploy the required plugins and agents to your environment.  All devices can go to and sign into a website hosted by the appliance and receive the correct version of the Receiver agent and all the plugins which the device supports.

As I mentioned this is currently, online plugin, offline plugin, AppV plugin.  Hang on did I say AppV plugin?

It is possible to use Receiver to get you AppV applications, whilst this initially sounds redundant, "Why would I want Citrix in the way of AppV?"

Remember that there is no AppV client for MacOS, iOS, Android or Blackberry.

Cool.

Citrix have added, in keeping with the current trend, a storefront to the applications pool.  You can now select applications which you wish to use from a "pool" of approved applications.  No longer will you have countless prescribed applications hanging around in your desktop.

Couple this with the fact that Citrix have consolidated the Receiver interface across devices.  Receiver now looks the same no matter what device you use.

Did I mention seamless session state across devices too?  Work on a document on the train on your iPad get into work and log into your desktop and the application and document will "move" over to your desktop.

Excited.  Me.  Never.