In response to a surprising blog on the Citrix website suggesting XenDesktop wasn't an option for Mobile Workers I posted the below reply.
As one of the first customers to have deployed XenDesktop, I disagree that it 'doesn't address the needs of Mobile Workers', as we have deployed to a Mobile Workforce!
Our interest in XenDesktop first started due to core legacy applications not working in a XenApp environment. However, it became clear that XenDesktop had a number of other key benefits:
- Limited Training - it's the desktop they know and love 
, and works exactly as if they were in the office.
- Security - Complete data seperation, the user isn't tempted to use the local desktop for anything at all, so everything happens securely in the datacenter.
- Management - It's easy to maintain one image, even with Apps installed inside it thanks to Provisioning Server. Arguably it's easier than maintaining a number of XenApp Servers delivering your applications. As even though you can use Provisioning Server for Datacenters to manage your Server images, if you split your applications (we have lots!) between Servers there's more images to manage.
As the article states the obvious drawback is that you don't get the same number of users per server, but we were prepared to take this hit as Usability is the key for us, and this was critical to the success of the project and four us is much better in XenDesktop.
If you're interested, I'll be posting more information about my experiences with XenDesktop at my site XenPro.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites