Citrix Synergy 2017 recap

So how do you get people around the world jazzed about your particular brand of nuts and bolts software?  If you are Citrix,  you rent out the Orange County Conference Center in Orlando for a few days and then encourage a few thousand of your hardcore customers, employees, partners and vendors to come and evangelize your message for 96 straight hours and then cap it off with a big private party at Universal Studios Theme Park.  
Doesn’t matter what you might have thought about Citrix at the start, you can’t help but be into it by the end of such an intense communal Kool-Aid drinking marathon.
tldr; The message was pretty consistent with the Citrix messaging of the past : Any.* – Any Device, Anywhere, Anytime.   And the march to the cloud continues. (with or without you)
Three solid days of sessions, parties, networking and fact finding (or mystery solving as Malcolm Gladwell let us know in a super interesting and relevant keynote speech).  From a session standpoint, my clear favorite was #Syn706 – Building a XenApp real-time session monitoring dashboard.    This session was given by my friend Sam Jacobs and walked everyone (about 500 people in the room) through a step by step exercise of building a detailed rich dashboard using PowerShell and the Citrix snapins.  More than the Citrix dashboard, Sam gave everyone an entry level PowerShell foundation to build whatever other scripts they may have been thinking about.  I’m by no means a PowerShell guru so this added bonus was a welcome surprise.  If you missed it, be sure to watch Citrix for the recording. (or watch this blog – I’ll post once it’s available).

On the actual Citrix front, they hammered home the idea that if you are still running 6.5, you should begin down your upgrade path to 7.14 or risk being left behind (both in support and features).  No major earth shattering news was announced or any acquisition news that I heard.  This was definitely a maintenance cycle type of conference.   You had to go seek out useful information and the hands on labs were the perfect tools for that.  Hands on with the full Citrix product line.  The solutions expo, while smaller than usual had a lot of side stages for individual product demonstrations and niche education.  I took advantage of quite a few of those.
Wednesday night was time for the biggest private party event of the conference.  The M7 Global Party at BB Kings.  If you weren’t able to snag an invite this year, you need to contact your local M7 partner and start some projects so you can be on the VIP list for next year.  This was after all, a client appreciation party. 

Last stop on the conference party train was Universal Studios.  This was awesome.  After hours access at a theme park with no lines and free food and drink.  What more could you ask for in a final conference party?
All in all, it was absolutely great to reconnect with clients, vendors, peers and colleagues in Florida.
Till next time #CitrixSynergy!