The moment Citrix Cloud services users and administrators have all been waiting for is officially here!

Citrix has completed the rollout of the new Citrix Workspace user interface to all our customers. As PJ Hough mentioned in his recent blog post, we said, at Citrix Synergy this past May, that we would deliver new solutions 90 days. True to that promise, the new Citrix Workspace user interface was unveiled earlier this month. As he also mentioned, cloud services are not deployed overnight. We have been gradually rolling out the new UI for some time, and I’m happy to announce that as of Friday, August 17, our roll-out was 100 percent complete. Every Citrix Cloud customer now has access to the new UI:

Citrix Workspace app 

Before we dive in, I want to remind everyone that the new UI works hand-in-hand with the new Citrix Workspace app. To ensure that each customer would be able to take advantage of the new UI as it shipped, the first milestone in delivering the new UI was to ensure that the Citrix Workspace app was available to every user. My colleague Vipin Borkar announced the availability of Citrix Workspace app in his blog. You can simply go to your favorite app store to download Citrix Workspace app. As a quick reminder, Citrix Workspace app has ALL the capabilities that exist within Citrix Receiver PLUS new capabilities related to the larger Workspace vision, such as the ability to access the new UI. You cannot do that if you are simply running Citrix Receiver. To be clear, the new Workspace user experience requires every user to upgrade to the new Citrix Workspace app. As an alternative, you can also use a browser; Citrix Receiver will not support the new Workspace user experience.

Citrix Workspace platform

User Experience 

Within the Citrix Workspace platform there is an end-user WebUI that is rendered across all devices using either the browser or Citrix Workspace app. The whole idea here is that, as we evolve and enhance the user experience, we can continue to be agnostic to the device and ensure consistency across all devices.

Let’s take authentication, for example. Previously, your Citrix Receiver authentication experience could vary based on the operating system. Each Citrix Receiver client had to be designed individually to account for the variations in the operating system. This, in turn, resulted in variations in the way Citrix Receiver for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS or web handled authentication. There were inconsistencies among operating systems.

We realized this was a major opportunity for the Citrix Workspace experience. Now we can handle the authentication at the platform level instead of at the device level. This results in a more consistent user experience across devices, as well as the ability to deliver new authentication capabilities directly in the platform without the need for administrators to upgrade management components.

Here’s a more specific example. There are no caveats for Azure Active Directory (AAD)/time-based one-time password (TOTP). Now, AAD/TOTP uses the WebView from the Workspace platform, giving you consistency across devices.

This is just the beginning. We will continue to streamline the user experience across all operating systems with the Workspace platform. The key take-away here is that as we add new functionality to the user experience, Citrix can typically make these enhancements directly within the platform without requiring you to continuously patch or upgrade to new versions of the Citrix Workspace app. Now, of course, sometimes things can only be done on the client-side and we will continue to enhance Citrix Workspace app in parallel.

Configuration

The next question you likely have is, “How do I get this set-up?” The configuration for the new user experience is simply called “Workspace configuration.” It is accessible as part of Citrix Cloud. Workspace configuration is the centralized place within the Citrix Cloud management interface that enables you to control and configure the user experience.

How do you get started? All you need is a Citrix Cloud service trial.

Choose from Citrix Secure Browser service, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, Citrix Secure Web Gateway service, or any option you desire. Stay tuned for my upcoming blog posts, where I will walk you through some of the key configuration examples.