Citrix Workspace had a banner year in 2019. Hundreds of new features added to the rapidly growing platform led to a threefold increase in customer adoption, with more than 1,000 early adopters taking advantage of the new Citrix Workspace experience.

In 2020, we’re continuing to accelerate product development while investing even more to help our customers embrace digital transformation while maximizing employee experience.

A recent study by 451 Research highlights IT priorities for 2020. At the top of the list is a focus on improving employee experience and engagement by providing workers with the tools the need to be their most productive and collaborative. The study also highlights the importance of embracing cloud technologies while modernizing apps and their related workflows.

In fact, if you go down the entire list of IT priorities in the chart below, Citrix Workspace offers a comprehensive, complete solution that accelerates digital transformation across the board.

  • Maximize productivity by accessing all your applications and files through a single window.
  • Reduce time spent navigating complex enterprise apps by leveraging innovative microapp and bot technology (virtual assistance).
  • Easily provision applications and workloads to run on any cloud.
  • Automate and streamline user workflows with machine learning.
  • Deliver a consistent user experience across all device types, including mobile.
  • Simplified security and access control configured through a unified Workspace console.

And the list goes on and on.

Keeping the priorities above in mind, let’s look at some of the new Workspace features that debuted in this past month.

Citrix Workspace

Virtual assistance is now available for Workspace Standard, Premium, and Premium Plus customers. Virtual assistance enables workers to leverage bot technology to quickly and easily access relevant content and business data. Checking a PTO balance or expense report status are some common examples.

Citrix Assistant works by pulling content from connected applications, helping employees quickly find the information they need. Using automated intelligence and machine learning, the virtual assistant parses natural language into structured language while retrieving the requested information.

Check out our technical overview of the capabilities of Citrix Workspace virtual assistance.

Microsoft Teams integration with the Citrix Workspace is currently available as a Tech Preview. As Microsoft Teams grows in popularity, Citrix Workspace is adding value to the user experience through integration between the two applications/services. Integration can take place in one of three ways:

  • All microapp actions and notifications can be forwarded directly, by the user, from Citrix Workspace to any Microsoft Teams channel.
  • All microapp actions and notifications can automatically be sent directly to Microsoft Teams. This is configurable via the IT admin. With this method, two microapp cards would be sent, one to Citrix Workspace (user) and one to Microsoft Teams (user).
  • Citrix Workspace virtual assistance capabilities can be permanently embedded in a Teams channel, enabling users to interact with Citrix Workspace from Microsoft Teams.

Contact your Citrix customer success manager or account representative for more information on accessing these new intelligent features.

Citrix Endpoint Management

Enhanced enrollment profiles (multi-mode) support allows IT to support multiple enrollment profiles (delivery groups) on a single Citrix Endpoint Management platform instance. Depending on user security requirements, IT can mix and match support for MDM-only, MDM+MAM, MDM + Intune MAM, MDM-lite and MAM-only.

The Citrix Endpoint Management console redesign provides an improved, simplified admin experience. In addition to simplified workflows, the new console redesign includes in-product notifications and tutorials. In-product tutorials are currently live.

The goal of this redesign is to provide a more simplified experience while improving the integration when working with various platform-level management standards such as Android Enterprise, iOS, Windows, and Chrome.

Android Enterprise support for fully managed device with work profile and web app publishing greatly enhances the administrative experience of managing Android devices via the Citrix Endpoint Management platform.

The use case for a fully managed device with a work profile is primarily for corporate issued devices where the user also requires some “personal space” and privacy. Workers typically don’t want to carry around two devices (one for work and one for personal). Having a work profile on a fully managed device means that IT can only see and manage the work profile (the container of work-related applications). The rest of the device can be used for personal applications such as photos, messaging, social media, and more without concern that IT has visibility.

Support for Android Enterprise web app publishing is a great workflow improvement for IT. Previously, IT would be required to go to a Google Play account for application publishing. Now, admins can publish URL-based web applications directly from the Citrix Endpoint Management console.

Tech Preview features currently available for the Citrix Endpoint Management service include iOS User Enrollment, mobile third-party SSO, Gateway Service integration (i.e. micro-VPN service) and Global App Configuration for Workspace app.

For more details on these Citrix Endpoint Management capabilities and others, check out our What’s New page.

Citrix Analytics

Citrix Analytics is all about delivering insights, not more noise. In that spirit, the team has developed a comprehensive way to understand user risk exposure by grouping similar risks into known categories. This easy-to-digest dashboard enables a broad set of security and non-security administrators to understand where risk lies within their system.

Citrix Analytics supports the following risk categories:

  • Data exfiltration
  • Insider threats
  • Compromised users
  • Compromised endpoints

Learn more about the four risk categories.

Custom risk indicators can also be assigned a risk category to be included in the Risk Categories dashboard.

For more details on these Citrix Analytics capabilities and others, see our What’s New page. And, as always, Citrix Analytics is available for a no-fee, 60-day trial from cloud.citrix.com.

Citrix Content Collaboration

RightSignature compliance for signature flow (EU) is now available for our EMEA customer base. The European Union Citrix Workspace control and management plane meets security and compliance requirements including GDPR.

As you know, Citrix Synergy 2020 is just around the corner. We’ll have a lot of exciting new product developments to talk about before and during the event. Register today!

We’ll be back again next month for another roundup of What’s New with Citrix Workspace features.