Citrix Converge Sneak Peek: Building integrations for Citrix Workspace

Do you want to know the secret sauce behind Citrix Workspace and the intelligent experience that its integrations enable? Or are you just wondering why Citrix recently announced its first developer conference? Keep reading!

Our primary focus in 2019 is to make Citrix Workspace extensible using integrations. Integrations provide users with relevant, actionable notifications, combined with intuitive microapp workflows, to make the most important use cases of business systems and applications directly accessible from a user’s Workspace. This can be used for:

• Building a cutting-edge experience and user interface for legacy business applications that just can’t be replaced. Almost every business has them. (Mainframes won’t go away!)
• Save users time by reducing context switching and eliminating the need to learn how to use various applications for one-off interactions. This also improves the user experience because they can focus on their primary responsibilities and avoid distractions.

I recently had the privilege of announcing Citrix Converge, our first developer conference. Citrix Converge is born out of the idea that Citrix Workspace can be extended by developers, partners and customers using integrations. Every business is unique, and there are countless applications that could be integrated into Citrix Workspace to improve the employee and user experience, helping to save time and money.

Building integrations for Citrix Workspace is not rocket science. A low-code editor makes it a simple, creative process that involves:

1. Selecting a target business application for integration
2. Identifying integration use cases
3. Configuring interactions and caching relevant data
4. Creating a microapp with notifications and pages

Let’s dive into each of these.

1) Selecting a Target Business App for Integration

First, we need to select a target application that holds information of interest to Citrix Workspace users.

Of particular interest are applications that are regularly used for quick (<1 minute) tasks and are not intuitively accessible to users. Also, applications that enable users to directly interact (e.g. approve items) from within Citrix Workspace have much more value than applications that just enable notification of users.

Let’s consider this hypothetical system:

• Target business application: Imaginary time-off management SaaS application

2) Identifying Integration Use Cases

Next, we identify key use cases for the selected target business application that we want to integrate into Citrix Workspace. This is a creative process and should take into account:

• The potential time savings that can be achieved by integrating the use case
• The effort required to implement the use case

For our imaginary time-off management system, key use cases might include:

• Use case 1: Book PTO
• Use case 2: Approve PTO

3) Configuring interactions and caching relevant data

Once use cases are known, the next step is to identify the APIs that will allow us to extract relevant information from the target system or inject back into it. This step might well involve back-and-forth iterations to the use-case identification because the target system might not provide suitable APIs to implement a use case.

The most common API standard today is RESTful APIs, which provide responses formatted using JSON. Nearly all modern enterprise SaaS applications will implement APIs like that. For our imaginary case, API endpoints of interest are:

• API endpoint to book PTO: POST http://my.api.example/pto/
• API endpoint to get pending approvals: GET http://my.api.example/pending_pto_approvals/
• API endpoint to approve PTO: PUT http://my.api.example/pending_pto_approvals/{id}

If the target system uses JSON REST and any common authentication mechanism (oAuth 2, NTLM, Basic Auth, Bearer Auth), chances are good that the system can be integrated with Citrix Workspace seamlessly, using the low-code “JSON integration”-type:

After creating the integration, the next step is to configure the API endpoints. To do this, we configure the data endpoints for reading relevant data into the cache. Any data that we want to show to the user (or want to trigger events or actions with) must be cached. For the example above, the only data we need to read into the cache is the pending PTO approvals:

It’s also possible to write data back to the target application in a similar way. Here, it would be used for submitting PTO requests and to approve PTO requests.

Note that if the targeted application is a legacy one that doesn’t provide suitable JSON REST APIs yet, that shouldn’t stop you. In this case, it’s possible to develop a thin translation layer or wrapper using “real” code, which translates from the old legacy API to a new accessible JSON REST API. But that’s a blog post for another day!

4) Creating a Microapp with Notifications and Pages

Once the data is available in the cache, it’s all about creating a new microapp.

Microapps have two key elements:

• Notifications, which appear in a user’s Citrix Workspace feed
• Pages, which are microapp flows that either show more details or allow users to take action

Notifications are triggered by an event:

Also, notifications feature a condition, as well as the ability to target certain users or groups:

Finally, we’ll design the notification card layout:

The next step is to add one or more pages that highlight relevant additional information for the user. Ideally the user can directly take action using an “approve” button or other button on the page.

To create this, we use the WYSIWYG microapp builder:

Once there are actions defined on the page, they can also be made available from within the notification.

And that’s it!

Join Us at Citrix Converge

I hope this post has given you an idea of how easy it is to integrate new systems with Citrix Workspace. If you’re interested in learning more and want to be among the very first to get building, please join us at our first developer conference, Citrix Converge, on October 2-3 in Santa Clara, California. Check out my earlier blog post for details.

If you want to register straight away, then please provide your contact information! Note that as seats are limited, and we cannot guarantee a place. Citrix will contact selected attendees as soon as practical.

Any questions? Please leave them in the comments below!