Launched last summer, Citrix Workspace increased the number of user experiences across StoreFront, both on Citrix Cloud and on premises. With the recent StoreFront 1811 release, we have streamlined these experiences to just two: one for on-premises StoreFront, where the focus is on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, and one for Citrix Workspace, as part of Citrix Cloud. Designed for use across many different cloud services, Citrix Workspace enables integration among services to provide users with a single location to access everything they need.
Updating the On-Premises Unified Experience
If you had a Citrix Workspace trial before the August release, you might be familiar with the unified experience in StoreFront. It provides an updated look with extra functionality and makes things easier for your end users.
Before:
After:
The screens are similar, with slight updates to card designs and new capabilities for marking favorites. With the new experience, you don’t have to go inside the application to take actions like marking favorites. You just click the star in the top left corner of the card. The yellow star means it’s a favorite.
We removed the ability to manually reorder apps on the homepage. Customer feedback showed that this wasn’t a widely used feature. And any branding you had with the previous unified experience has been preserved, but we recommend that you check the customization to ensure it is still compatible with the new unified experience.
Deprecation of the Classic User Experience
If you’re using StoreFront with Virtual Apps and Desktops, you might be providing the classic experience to your users. This was the first user experience that was truly consistent across all devices.
As mentioned in the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1808 documentation (deprecation notice), the classic experience is being deprecated. You can still use the classic user experience with StoreFront 1811, but we plan to remove it by the end of Q1 2019. Please start working to transition your users to the unified experience.
In the past, you may have been concerned about switching your users to the older unified experience in StoreFront because it didn’t have a consistent look and feel across different devices. With the updated user experience in the Storefront 1811 release, you get a consistent look and feel when using Citrix Receiver across desktops and the web with your on-premises StoreFront deployment. You can also use the Citrix Workspace app with the same unified experience you see with Citrix Receiver; mobile also has the same look and feel.
Start making your users aware of the changes to the unified experience in the StoreFront 1811 release so it doesn’t come as a surprise. And, remember, any customizations you made have been ported over with the release, but we recommend you test them to confirm they’re still working.
Benefits of Citrix Workspace
As I am sure you have seen via blogs, news articles or even at Citrix Synergy last May 2018, Citrix Workspace was announced as part of Citrix Cloud. With it came a whole host of new features.
One benefit of Citrix Workspace is a feature called site aggregation, which enables you to integrate your existing on-premises deployment within Citrix Workspace. You can connect to your existing Virtual Apps and Desktops 7.x environment and use published applications within Citrix Workspace without changing anything on your existing environment. Your users’ current experience will not be affected. However, you can get some users to start trying out the new experience, while keeping others on the current experience. Check out this blog post for more on site aggregation.
After you have access to Citrix Workspace alongside your existing applications and desktops, you can start adding services by requesting trials of products such as Content Collaboration, which enables you to add files into the Citrix Workspace. There, you can access, launch and edit them without leaving the application. If you set up site aggregation with Virtual Apps and Desktops 7.x, you can bring your file type associations and use those to launch the files in the appropriate applications.
We also have new Citrix Secure Workspace Access, which enables you to deploy web and SaaS applications securely. You can leverage it and Citrix Analytics to make location-based decisions on how your users access applications.
We’re excited about the StoreFront 1811 release and what it means for customers. The streamlined user experience will help us deliver to you a more consistent and richer experience across our products.
