Organizations have been publishing applications via popular RDSH (Remote Desktop Session Host) based solutions for decades. It is a great way to centralize management and support for apps in enterprise and a really great way to support remote workers. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is one of the most popular products of this kind but other solutions like VMware Horizon Apps, Parallels RAS, Microsoft RemoteApp/Azure Virtual Desktop, Cameyo, Workspot and Software2 AppsAnywhere are growing in popularity and offer great user experiences. The cloud based offerings of some of these products have been growing steadily in popularity.
In various different industries, a lot of employees rely on just a few applications for their work and do not really need a full desktop. This is great from a cost and support perspective as the Operating System resource spend is shared across many users and there is potentially less things that can go wrong when you don’t have users tied 1:1 on a dedicated desktop.
I recently posted an article focused on our Citrix integration with Numecent Cloudpaging that showcases how you can deliver your apps with Cloudpaging and then publish to users via Citrix Studio or potentially directly published to your Citrix Virtual Desktops. Deploying Cloudpaging apps to your servers and desktops is an awesome way to reduce desktop or server images updates, expedite application updates, reduce application conflicts and provide a truly dynamic application delivery BUT what about those apps you have that aren’t a good fit to be delivered as published applications? Do you just add them into your desktop images instead? What if that’s the only app a user needs locally installed? Do you really want to give them a full desktop just for that one app? What if that one app is expensive with limited licensing, are you going to put that in your desktops and silo just for those users or attempt to mask it? It seems very complicated and wasteful doesn’t it?
I encountered this with apps like Camtasia used by marketing departments. This just does not work as a published application because what they want to record is on their screen not in the published app’s session. Rendering videos is also quite resource intensive meaning running this on a published desktop or Windows 10 multi-session desktop in Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop is not advisable. The best experience with Camtasia is running it on an endpoint.
Here is something I did: I setup multiple Cloudpaging Servers and have one I use for deploying applications to my users on virtual desktops and/or as published applications and another for making apps that are suited to running directly on remote or even internal endpoints for those who need them.
Marketing departments, claims departments and numerous others prefer to use Snagit over the built in Windows Snipping tool plus with the Snipping Tool changing to Snip & Sketch with Windows 11, more and more may look to great alternatives like Snagit. This is another app that is best used directly on the endpoint. The images you want to capture are usually on your device.
Cisco Jabber has been a big talking point with people working remotely. Many workers providing phone support remotely spend their entire day on Cisco Jabber or another form of Softphone. This can be a challenge for those relying on a VPN where network performance can fluctuate and cause audio quality degradation. Running Jabber as a published application or in a virtual desktop requires deploying the JVDI Agent to the Citrix VDA and the JVDI Client on the endpoint being used. This can be challenging with a remote workforce. An alternative could be deploying it directly to the remote endpoint with Cloudpaging. No need for optimizations and audio redirections.
One other great aspect of Cloudpaging Server and indeed the cloud edition of the product (Cloudpaging Content Delivery Network) is the license control. If you do want to deliver to remote endpoints that are your company’s hardware or even personal devices of users, you can choose to set an expiration. Could be useful particularly for those using their own devices and are getting a licensed product like Camtasia or Snagit from you.
Conclusion
By using Cloudpaging to deliver these applications directly down to a user’s endpoint, we reduce the need for full desktops for users and ensure all applications are available remotely and I mean ALL applications. Cloudpaging does not suffer from the same set of limitations as other app delivery products. The unique disposition layers empower you to deliver all of your Windows apps dynamically to ensure the best end user experience and a great admin experience too.
Whether supporting 100% work from home users, hybrid workers or even those permanently in the office, I find that Numecent Cloudpaging is a god send. It is so much easier than other products when it comes to packaging and thanks to the high success rate it reduces complexity of mixing up different package formats and deployment methods. As illustrated in this blog post, you can also use it to deploy all of your apps to your session hosts no matter what product you use for that, you can deploy your apps to your virtual desktops or even make apps available for use on physical endpoints for workers on your network or even working externally. In this blog, I focused on the on-prem Cloudpaging Server for my example. I have also used the Numecent Cloudpaging Content Delivery Network for providing remote workers a cloud based published app option too. That also works great. I hope to blog more about my experience with that in future. If you use Cloudpaging and would like to share your knowledge of the product, you can join the Cloudpaging User Group. If you don’t know much about the solution but would like to learn more, you should also JOIN.
