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Creating dynamic teaching labs with Citrix and Liquidware

This is a guest post by Jason E. Smith – VP Products, Liquidware.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops keeps digital workspaces at universities and other institutions of higher education dynamic, enabling faculty and students to access a Windows desktop from the cloud or an on-prem data center instantly. Ensuring that students have the applications required to perform work in lab/classroom environments is an ongoing challenge for education workspace administrators. For IT departments to continually spin up unique Windows desktops with labs applications for university students is a time consuming task.

By combining Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Liquidware FlexApp, Windows workspace admins can now size, design, and deliver applications in teaching labs dynamically. FlexApp focuses only on attaching applications to an otherwise easy-to-manage base image created with Citrix Provisioning or with Citrix App Layering. This approach overcomes base image sprawl, assigns applications dynamically, and eases the updates of applications. FlexApp enables you transform static education labs into dynamic labs, so that the same devices can serve students across curricula, by delivering only the applications that they need on demand at login.

So, how does this work in practice? A few simple steps are all that is required:

By attaching applications with FlexApp versus application isolation, a substantial number of applications can be deployed with near 100 percent compatibility. Furthermore, updates to the base image can be facilitated separately and handled with Citrix Provisioning and/or Citrix App Layering.

Because of FlexApp’s high compatibility rate with many of the leading applications used across academic institutions, creating dynamic labs is simple and straight-forward. Academic institutions gain the following compelling advantages:

Coupling FlexApp’s on-demand, “follow-me” approach with Citrix’s Future of Work philosophy makes the combination a powerful force for universities to deliver applications that keep their students happy and productive. This approach supports on-premises deployments as well as cloud, thereby enabling IT even more flexibility and agility for provisioning of labs.

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