As I teased in my recap, the Citrix Converge attendees exceeded our expectations when it came to their engagement, creativity, and interest in Citrix Workspace. After a six-hour hackathon, they built and demoed 15 useful and innovative microapps!

At the conference, after walking through various hands-on labs, attendees formed ad hoc teams and started projects of their choosing for a six-hour hackathon. At the end of the time period, 15 teams volunteered to demonstrate their integrations live on stage. It was quickly clear they recognized the opportunity we are creating with the Citrix Workspace platform. All the integrations used Citrix Workspace to guide and automate common work tasks with the goal of improving employee productivity and engagement.

We only expected (hoped for) a handful of demos. But in the end, we had more demos than we had time to demo! The attendees were engaged and excited to see what other teams had built, so we pushed on and made it a working lunch, as demo after demo showed us new and creative ways developers can “fix work” with Citrix Workspace microapps.

Solutions ran the gamut and included task automation related to diverse areas such as:

  • Sales force automation
  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
  • Human capital management (HCM)
  • Corporate travel booking
  • Accounting
  • Software development process
  • Computer systems administration
  • IT security

And the drumroll please for the winning demos. (You can almost hear it, right?)

  • Best for employee efficiency​: Team Phases​ (Daniel Horn​, Nikhil AP​) — Registering sales leads in Podio using e-conomic as the back end for accounting.
  • Most innovative​: Team Brick Bridge Consulting​ (Gil Roberts​, Alex Shull​) — Integrating a Podio-based CRM leveraging Zapier to update Mailchimp mailing lists.
  • Best for non-managers: Team Galactic Travel​ (Seth Helgeson​, Max Lindqvist​, Mike Demunter​, Tom Dirlich​) — End-to-end travel booking from within Citrix Workspace.
  • Honorable mentions:
    • Team Conecto​ (Martin Therkelsen, Brian Sprogø​​) — Management of VDAs hosted on Azure using Azure Automation and its runbooks.
    • Team Envision My Process​ (Bob Dankert​, Richard Manga​) — Customer feedback handling from within Workspace, leveraging Fujitsu RMP’s ML capabilities.
  • Best of Citrix: Team Ninja Hackers (Rachelle Tobkes​ and Manbinder Pal Singh) — Integration with O365. Enabling Workspace users to locate colleagues and meeting rooms using visual mapping, book meetings, and receive reminders.

The back-end systems integrations included:

  • GitHub (developer tools)
  • ConnectWise (automation)
  • Namely (human resources)
  • RunMyProcess (workflow)
  • JIRA (issue tracking)
  • SSL Labs (security)
  • Twilio (SMS integration​)
  • Zapier (integration aggregator)
  • MailChimp via Zapier (mailing list)
  • O365 via Microsoft Graph (business suite)
  • Visma E-Conomic (accounting)
  • Podio (project management)
  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (application delivery and security)
  • Azure functions to launch powershell (cloud computing and automation)