Welcome to the first installment of a new Citrix blog series designed to help you understand the powerful impact microapp technology can have on employee experience and how you can deliver it. Each post in this series will highlight a new use case you can leverage to keep your workers productive, focused, and engaged wherever and whenever they happen to be working.

What’s a microapp and why do they matter?

The easiest way to describe a microapp is to put it in context with your everyday work life. Throughout our day we’re required to complete tasks, many of which make up larger workflows.

Some of these workflows are directly related to the job we’re getting paid to do. For example, a sales manager who navigates the Salesforce app every day to monitor and take action on new business added to the pipeline.

Some tasks, on the other hand, are better described as “housekeeping” items. Examples include submitting time-off requests, entering business expense reports, or opening an IT ticket because your account has been locked.

Housekeeping items may require you to stop what you’re doing, toggle away to a new application, access the application, navigate that application, take action, close the application, and toggle back to what you were doing.

After all that, you’re probably saying, “Now, where was I?” You need to regain your train of thought, refocus and get into a new working rhythm. Navigating back to your key value-adding workflows, on the other hand, can require accessing multiple applications that result in frustrating logins, fragmented data landscapes, and inefficient communication with your colleagues.

This process repeats itself throughout the day, wreaking havoc on your ability to stay productive and engaged and get real work done.

Citrix Workspace microapp integrations solve this problem by automatically surfacing key tasks and pushing them to workers within Citrix Workspace on the devices of their choice along with the information and insights they need to get them done so they can quickly take action and get on with their day.

Citrix Workspace can talk to the system-of-record applications, behind the scenes, presenting users with simplified actions that can be accomplished with the click of a button as well as notifications that keep them informed with notable updates and team communications.

In the example below, the user no longer has to navigate to a separate application to approve an expense report. They can do it directly from within their Citrix Workspace, simply scrolling within their intelligent feed to the relevant card and approving the request.

IT Self-Service

Today’s first look will highlight the IT self-service use case. Although many companies have begun the process of automating IT services, users are still required to go somewhere else to access those services and complete those tasks. Often, users aren’t sure where or how to navigate to an intranet page or even access a separate application, resulting in an overload of IT inquiries on basic tasks, taking them away from key initiatives.

In the demonstration below, you’ll see how Citrix Workspace, with its intelligent capabilities, can simplify and improve upon these important IT service workflows . Not only can they make requests to back-end systems, like ServiceNow, directly from the Citrix Workspace app, users can also track, follow up, and remediate issues from within the Citrix Workspace app intelligent feed, as well. Let’s take a look:

After viewing the demo, you should have better understanding of how your own workers can benefit from these streamlined, task-oriented workflows. The use cases are numerous.

Citrix Workspace already supports over 100 microapp integrations with many of the top SaaS vendors in market today including Salesforce, Workday, SAP, Concur and many more. In fact, we support out-of-the box templates, making it incredibly easy to turn on microapps and start delivering a better employee experience.

If we don’t already have the microapp template you’re looking for, that’s OK. Our microapp builder is a no-code, drag-and-drop tool designed to easily build your own microapps.

For more information on Citrix’s microapp technology, terminology, and deployment scenarios, please check out our Citrix Workspace microapp product documentation.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you’ll join us again for the next installment of Citrix Workspace First Look microapp demonstrations.