A couple of years ago I got fed up with my cable provider and decided to cut the cord. For the most part, the experience has been great. I have hardwired connections into the back of my TVs and use a popular streaming service to get most of my channels.
My biggest complaint is that all streaming providers come short of providing a full lineup of the channels that I want. One might have everything but sports; another may have everything except local channels; and one might be missing a movie channel.
To fill in the programming gaps, I leverage multiple standalone apps. So while I’m saving money, there’s definitely downside in terms of navigation and user experience. In other words, this new way of doing things is slowing me down.
We can draw an analogy between my TV viewing situation and the way many of us work today.
There are literally hundreds of vendors who use the term workspace to describe their products and solutions. The number of workspaces we have is growing. How many is too many? And is bouncing around among workspaces slowing you down? I’m guessing your answer is yes.
Citrix Workspace addresses this issue in a few different ways. Citrix Workspace with intelligence helps workers organize, guide, and automate work. Not only does Citrix provide a unified workspace experience, it also enhances the experience of other workspace channels, including collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams
How does Citrix Workspace with Citrix Workspace app help organize work?
With Citrix Workspace, everything you need to get work done is available through one experience. You can access SaaS apps, virtual apps, mobile apps, web apps, files, and virtual desktops via single sign-on. Integrated search capabilities, across Citrix Workspace services, help with organization by providing a fast and easy way to find the information you’re looking for.
Citrix Workspace also aggregates and unifies multi-vendor work experiences. For example, a customer who has invested in Okta or Box can leave the back-end infrastructure in place while delivering the apps and files through the Citrix Workspace app front end.
How does Citrix Workspace with intelligence help to guide and automate the work experience?
The secret sauce of Citrix Workspace with intelligence is the microapp service, which allows IT to create workflows and actions that greatly reduce a user’s reliance on full-size SaaS applications to accomplish simple tasks.
Delivered to a consumer-like intelligence feed, microapps can guide the user through their workday by minimizing time spent navigating between multiple workspace environments. In the example below, a worker would interact with these microapps instead of switching contexts from their current window to the SAP Concur desktop application.
Customers always ask if we’re trying to replace Slack, Teams, or email with the Citrix Workspace app. The answer is an emphatic no. While it’s important to minimize the number of channels workers are switching to and from, e-mail and real-time collaboration and chat platforms are critical to business operations. The omnichannel Citrix Workspace intelligence, shown in the image below, enables IT admins to deliver microapps to other common work channels, improving those experiences, as well.
Below, you can see the Citrix Workspace microapp service’s integration with Microsoft Teams. You can configure microapps to be sent directly to a Teams channel, and microapps can be easily forwarded from the Citrix Workspace app to a Teams user or channel.
By maximizing employee experience, Citrix Workspace can make your business more competitive by increasing worker productivity and engagement.
But what about the IT side of things? How can the Citrix Workspace platform simplify IT and provide great security for your corporate data?
Just as multiple workspace experiences can be complicated and distracting for workers, multi-vendor workspace products and services can create nightmares for IT.
The biggest problem with taking a piecemeal approach to assembling and delivering a workspace is the resulting technology silos. Each vendor has its own tools for management and reporting, making it difficult to automate security and visibility on a holistic level. At Citrix, we believe there are numerous advantages to adopting a platform approach to workspace like improved IT agility, cost savings, and better experiences for both users and IT.
Only Citrix can offer a complete workspace with multiple service layers, as well as critical platform layers that include mature networking, analytics, and a consistent UI across all device types and operating systems.
With workspace platform layers in place, IT can operate in a more agile way. Turning on new services is much easier when you already have static layers for identity, security, management, and analytics.
Interested in taking a deeper look into Citrix Workspace with intelligence, how it can deliver a better employee experience, and how you can deploy it? Check out our on-demand Citrix Workspace webinar.
