‘Tis the season for Christmas trees, hot chocolate, ugly sweaters, and fruit cakes. Okay, maybe the last one is about as appealing as getting knitted socks as a gift. But one Christmas/end-of-year tradition that pops up all across the web is year-in-review articles.

The number of innovative features we unveiled in this whirlwind of a year could probably stretch across several blog posts. But I wanted take this time to recap some of what we released in 2018 for our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium (formally known as XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum) customers. These are just highlights of the features we announced in 2018 alone for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. We also released a number of Premium features for other aspects of our portfolio.

We pack all our editions with features that address our customer’s business challenges, enabling them for the future of work with our solutions. However, for customers who have Premium (or those considering upgrading to Premium), we packed in features that take that a step further. This blog is an opportunity to highlight some of the new features we developed for the Premium editions in 2018. Bear in mind, this is just what we’ve released this year on top of what’s already built into Premium.

Let’s revisit some of these features:

Enabling Security

Common Criteria certification is a feature a lot of our security-aware customers may be familiar with already. Common Criteria is a global set of guidelines developed for evaluating information security products, specifically to ensure they meet an agreed-upon security standard for government deployments. It’s used by 25 countries worldwide, with many more countries following the standards unofficially. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops was the first app and desktop virtualization solution to have achieved such worldwide security recognition. This is available for 7.15 LTSR.

We also made advancements to Citrix Session Recording, helping admins ensure security and mitigate risks in their infrastructure. And that’s with intelligent session recording. At a very high-level, intelligent session recording technology enhances monitoring, accelerates issue resolution, and simplifies compliance by providing a time-stamped visual record of individual application and desktop sessions.

Enhancing End-User Productivity

We also released features that were aimed at enhancing end-user productivity while enabling security. One of those was the Citrix Ready workspace hub, which, in combination with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium, enabled Citrix customers to enable a feature called Citrix Casting. Citrix Casting allows users to securely and seamlessly move Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops sessions from a mobile device to any display connected to Citrix Ready workspace hub.

Improving Desktop Management

This year, we also released a few features that enhance desktop management and reduce complexity and costs of managing published apps and desktops. One of those is Application Probing and Reporting, which allows admins to install multiple probes in branch offices to periodically test app launches and analyzes overall site performance.

Citrix Premium customers also get more enhancements with Citrix Director. Director Premium Edition gives administrators more flexibility when it comes to monitoring and managing their deployment including up to a year’s worth of performance data that provides a comprehensive view multitude of things such as: capacity trends, the ability to create customized reports, SCOM alerts, and desktop and server OS usage reporting. Administrators also can enable proactive notification and alerting, including SNMP integration, reboot warnings and be able to override control over roaming sessions. These enhancements ensure that IT is in complete control of their delivery solution for optimal performance and availability.

Integration with ServiceNow was another new feature. In mid-August this year, we released the Citrix ITSM Adapter, a key component that allows integration with ServiceNow. The Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow is a cloud service that provides single point of integration between Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to ServiceNow, enabling automation of common tasks in the enterprise with out of the box workflows aimed at improving efficiency, compliance, and productivity.

All Citrix Virtual Apps Premium, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service or Workspace Premium Plus customers can use these new features. Learn more about our range of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops features by edition in this feature matrix.

We’re excited about the work we did in 2018 and the innovative features we released in our Premium editions, as well as across our product portfolio. Be on the lookout for even more great features announcements throughout 2019.