Over the past six months, I’ve had the privilege of helping onboard some of our initial customers leveraging the intelligent capabilities of Citrix Workspace. If you haven’t heard by now, Citrix Workspace, including intelligent capabilities, is generally available and is helping many Citrix customers streamline and consolidate common workflows.

Now that remote work is ubiquitous due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are looking to modernize the workspace and drive employee productivity and engagement. Employees spend an average of 20 percent of their work-time looking for the right information and switching between several apps per day. Citrix Workspace unifies the user’s flow by providing an activity feed showing relevant information, while providing microapps that can streamline end user workflows and approvals.

In this blog post, I’ll look at lessons learned in the following four areas from more than six months of real-world implementations:

  1. Identify end-user pain points and design solutions around them
  2. Integration density is king
  3. Single sign-on leads to a great user experience
  4. High-level troubleshooting techniques

Identify End User Pain Points and Design Solutions Around Them

The first step to any successful deployment is to identify meaningful use cases. Use cases are cool, but improving employee experience is even cooler. When you build a flow that reduces an end user’s frustrations, they’ll not only gravitate to the platform, they’ll also be more satisfied. A few of our customers have transformation offices dedicated to identifying pain points. But have no fear, if your organization doesn’t have one, you can take the lead and implement elements of Design Thinking. Our main tools in the Design Thinking process were:

  1. End user interviews
  2. Process mapping/end-user shadowing (a derivative of Design Thinking’s journey mapping)
  3. UI prototyping and end-user validation

When performing end-user interviews, we create an environment where employees can vent about current pain points in their day-to-day processes. When we hear common threads among the targeted persona group, we dive deeper to figure out where microapps can help. Then we use end-user shadowing and process mapping techniques to showcase the problematic process from end to end. The next step is to prototype a “solution” using several UI tools and then validate the solution with the end user. If we do our jobs correctly, this pain point should be alleviated and drive end-user productivity.

The biggest “gotcha” of this process is technical feasibility. You don’t want to promise roses and deliver thorns! Be sure to work closely with system-of-record owners to validate technical feasibility throughout the process and discover where the data lives.

Integration Density Is King

Integration density is king, just as variety is the spice to life! The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts! I can probably think of a thousand ways to say this, but the message is this: To attract users to your workspace platform, you need to give them many reasons to use it. This phrase, coined by my colleague Doug Demskis, Principal Architect and Director of Global Solutions and Architecture, is critical to driving end-user adoption.

If you have a single system of record (Salesforce, for example), it may be hard to drive end-user adoption. However, when you add some microapps from your HRM system like Workday for PTO approval and an end-user onboarding, ITSM system like ServiceNow for process approvals, and ERP systems like SAP Ariba for requisitions (and more!), it can drive an attractive, holistic, single pane of access for the end user.

When someone logs into Citrix Workspace, their activity feed should be filled with a variety of high-value information across multiple systems of record. If they log in and consistently see “zero notifications,” they might opt to go directly to the SaaS app. Conversely, if there is more noise than signal, end users may find things spammy and avoid it completely. Ultimately, it comes down to striking a balance and implementing end-user feedback. For more information about setting up different microapp integrations, take a look at these Citrix documentation resources.

Single Sign-On Leads to a Great User Experience

One of the biggest benefits of Citrix Workspace is signing in once and having access to all your microapps, notifications, SaaS apps, files, published applications, and published desktops. That’s a pretty comprehensive solution available by typing in your credentials and using your second factor just once!

When using a AAA server hosted on a Citrix ADC and a modern web browser, we can leverage an existing custom identity provider (IdP) such as Okta that is probably already front ending existing SaaS apps. In fact, to have true SSO on first-write, we recommend keeping the IdP consistent across your Citrix Workspace and different SaaS applications. The login workflow could mirror the one in the below diagram. (At this time, single SSO prompt on first login only works for Citrix Workspace for HTML5.)

As you can see, by leveraging the same IdP throughout the login process, the user will have single sign-on when using the first microapp action and when pressing any deep links to the system of record. Going even further, you could enable SSO from corporate devices using a desktop agent. Find more information on using gateway authentication for Citrix Workspace in the following documentation:

High-Level Troubleshooting Techniques

You can think of Citrix Workspace as a platform layer that aggregates several systems of record and different cloud technologies. Since there are many moving parts involved in the overall solution, troubleshooting becomes a cross-platform/cross-team effort. A few of the teams involved are:

  • The System of Record Team
  • The Security/Identity Provider Team
  • The Citrix Workspace Team
  • The ADC and Networking Teams

Here are common troubleshooting points that we encountered over the past few months when a microapp or notification did not work as expected. In a future post, I will cover troubleshooting techniques that should shepherd you end to end. I recommend troubleshooting these in the following order:

  1. Validate Identity Provider (IdP) and System-of-Record (SoR) Permissions
    • If an end user is not able to login using the IdP, there is a strong chance they will not be able to do the same within microapps.
    • If an end user is not able to perform a write directly into the SoR, they will likely not be able to do the same within microapps.
    • If the OAuth token settings are not configured correctly, Citrix Workspace will likely not cache the OAuth token correctly.
    • If the end user’s email is not directly/indirectly linked to a record in the SoR, they will not be able to see it in Citrix Workspace. Please note, this uses Active Directory’s email attribute.
  2. Table Schema Filter Queries
    • In some cases, a record might not be pulled into the Citrix Workspace cache because of narrow schema filters.
    • Identify if the record is available in the cache; if it is not, the Service Account is either lacking permission or the filter is too narrow.
  3. Page/Notification Logic
    • If the record is in the cache, there is likely an issue with your page/notification logic.
    • Validate the logic and end-user email.

Conclusion

Citrix Workspace is an incredible technology that streamlines an end user’s interactions with their IT systems to drive productivity. When implementing with the considerations discussed in this blog, companies can achieve positive outcomes and increase employee satisfaction. Citrix Workspace enable you to aggregate important workflows into microapps, as well as provide access to files, virtual desktops, and published applications. If you want firsthand experience integrating a complete workspace solution, do not hesitate to reach out to Citrix Consulting Services!

Special thanks to the everyone I’ve worked with over the last six months, including PJ Calderon, Jing Song Huang, Xue Wang, Michael Romano, Jeff Qiu, Rob Zylowski, Charlie Brinson, Doug Demskis, Jesse Wilson, Ryan Keller, Jay Tomlin, Miguel Gomez, Rene Alfonso, Julio Gonzalez, Armand Collin, Greg Hayes, Somesh Naidu, Chris Mugisha, Nicholas Holmquist, Michael Gustafsson, Alex Cardenal, Renee Flores, Roger LaMarca, and Bridget Weinert. This was a group effort.