At Citrix Synergy last year, we introduced to the world our commitment to transforming the way people work with the unveiling of the new Citrix Workspace. The idea was to give employees and Citrix administrations tools that they need at their fingertips to make work seamless and easier.

One tool we announced last year was our integration of the Citrix ITSM Adapter with one of the industry’s leading ITSM vendors, ServiceNow. Since its release last August, we’ve had a tremendous amount of interest from new and existing customers, as well as a lot of positive feedback from the various customers I’ve met who’ve integrated their Citrix infrastructure with ServiceNow.

When we released this feature, our goal was to improve the various aspects of virtual app and desktop delivery, making it easier for IT to manage their Citrix environments by automating certain tasks. With out-of-the-box workflows and the ability to create custom workflows, IT teams can focus on strategic projects and automate the simpler tasks or requests they typically get from end users calling for support. Organizations can also on-board and off-board employees more quickly, create time-bound provisioning of apps and desktops, create self-service portals for users to request Citrix resources, and much more.

Let’s revisit some of the capabilities that the Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow provides.

Self-Service Requesting of Virtual Apps or Desktops

With the Citrix Workspace, having all my apps and desktops at my fingerprints in a single application (the Workspace app) is one of the biggest benefits of the Citrix Workspace itself. However, there could be instances where there’s an application I don’t have access to, so I’d have to log in a ticket with IT to get access. This could take days, or even weeks, as the ticket makes its way through an approval process.

With the ITSM Adapter and integration with ServiceNow, I can log into my company’s ServiceNow portal and request the application. That kicks off a workflow where the Citrix admin can view the request and assign me the application, giving me access within minutes or hours. This will work the same way if I made a request for a virtual desktop, as it’ll assign a desktop for me and provide me a Win10 desktop instantly.

Self-Service Resetting of Sessions

As indicated above, part of the new integration gives users self-service abilities to handle things on their end, freeing up IT resources to focus on other tasks. One of the capabilities available is self-service resetting of Citrix sessions in the event there’s an issue with the virtual app or virtual desktops. For example, if I’m in my Citrix Virtual Desktop and it freezes or it’s not responding, I can simply log into my company’s ServiceNow instance and reset my own VM instead of having to call into support and create a ticket with IT. Similar to self-service password reset, this allows me, the end user, to take control, reset my own session, and get right back to work.

Integration with Citrix Director

Another enhancement to expect in the near future with the Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow is integration with Citrix Director. With this enhancement, Citrix admins can set tickets to be created when a specific incident/event occurs. For example, if they set a parameter to log a ticket on behalf of a user who keeps running into session timeouts, or repeated log-offs, this allows an IT admin to see issues an end user is running into. From there, they can proactively take action and resolve the issue in the background before the end-user calls IT.

Looking Ahead

When we first launched the integration of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, we got a number of inquiries from customers on if there were plans to integrate other aspects of the Citrix portfolio to perform automated actions. At the time, our focus was to enhance the integration for Virtual Apps and Desktops before shifting efforts to the other products.

While I can’t go into specifics just yet, you can learn more about what those plans are at our dedicated Citrix Synergy session SYN707: Citrix & ServiceNow: Better Together with the ITSM Adapter. In this session, we’ll cover the basics of the integration, the plans going forward in 2019, demos, and how this feature will improve productivity and end-user experience for new and existing Citrix Workspace customers.

It’s first come, first serve, so be sure to add it to your Citrix Synergy calendar so you don’t miss the announcements. And stay tuned to the Citrix blog for future news on Citrix Workspace.