Every year we receive nominations for the Citrix Innovation Awards for Partners, and we continue to be in awe at the innovative ways our partners work to deliver business value for our joint customers and power a better way to work with Citrix solutions.

With the global pandemic continuing to affect business worldwide, the nominations for 2021 were filled with extraordinary solutions for the IT industry’s most challenging time. Our partners worked diligently to keep businesses open and people connected while forging better ways to work. We want to thank all our nominees and finalists for being the workforce heroes during such an unprecedented time, as they were the ones who brought the future of work to our homes.

After careful consideration of our nominees, we narrowed it down to three finalists and allowed the public to choose this year’s winner. We are incredibly proud to spotlight our 2021 Innovation Award for Partners winner. Congratulations to RawWorks for their exceptional work helping Hollands Kroon pioneer the future of the workplace into an innovative remote workspace, becoming the first municipality in the Netherlands to give their citizens access to virtual services.

RawWorks helped Hollands Kroon bring their IT structure to a more modern-day solution, transformed their Citrix virtual application desktop to a microapps-based portal model, and put custom microapps in production.

Before the pandemic, Hollands Kroon had already begun to give their staff the freedom to work remotely, on any device and operating system. While employees were happy working remotely with flexible hours on mobile devices, their IT structure was lacking.

As the program became successful, more businesses were ready to onboard, yet Hollands Kroon’s IT administrators felt frustrated. The user experience for all Hollands Kroon employees was fragmented as it required users to log into two separate environments. This caused an increase in user errors and redirected the IT team’s work.

RawWorks proposed using Citrix Workspace, which enabled Hollands Kroon to remove their published desktop and combine all their applications into a single portal. This solution gives both the users and IT administrators self-service access, allowing anyone to log an IT ticket, and has created automation of new IT accounts. The end result is a more user-friendly experience for all and more work flexibility for the IT staff.

This was accomplished through a joint effort by RawWorks and Hollands Kroon. RawWorks used Hollands Kroon’s top employee experience use cases to better understand what could be automated and what would help streamline work for everyone involved. Through this method, RawWorks built custom APIs and microapps that they delivered as a managed service.

This method has allowed 80 percent of business users in Hollands Kroon to onboard with ease and ongoing support. Users now have a one-click, single sign-on (SSO) experience and can access a range of everyday tools, from legacy applications to third-party SaaS apps.

Looking forward, Hollands Kroon plans to onboard more businesses and continue evolving Citrix Workspace by automating as much of their program as possible. They are currently working on integrating and automating an on- and off-boarding process and connecting HR and payroll. Their workplace transformation is truly inspiring, and the Netherlands has taken notice. Other municipalities have recognized their success and are looking at them to model future workplace transformations across the Netherlands.

In this video, Christ Twiest, Technology Office at RawWorks, Linda de Ridder, Partner at Rawworks, and Frank van Hoolwerff, ICT Advisor at Hollands Kroon, share more about their partnership and the impact their efforts have made on the Netherlands.