Today, Jan 3rd we celebrate the 3rd year of RESguru.com and a new staffmembers arrival. As you may recall there was a bit of controversy surrounding RESguru.com’s date of inception, but I’m glad this is behind us now and the usurper was silenced – at least for a while anyway :-) At this time, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank YOU, our regular readers and commentors for help in making the site what it is today. Your feedback and constructive critique has been essential to motivating myself and the other writers to continue what is essentially a labor of love.
I would also like to thank my current co-writers for providing quality content over the years. As all contributions to RESguru.com are on a completely voluntary basis, it’s with gratitude that I am able to publish the shared works of our regular staff, colleagues, friends and industry partners. To all of you: Thank you!
On that note, I would also like to welcome another RESguru onto the regular writer’s staff: Mr. Rob Aarts. Rob has a load of technical RES product experience which he’ll be sharing here on the ‘Guru site. His first article is about the new Global Variables in the RES Automation Manager. I’d suggest you give it a read! Rob’s bio can be found here.
ATTENTION: The training 2012 year is now over. Please refer to the 2013 training calendar.
From the Get-Yerself-Certified Dept. As the year is drawing to a close, it’s my pleasure to share with you the partner training calendar for the United States, 2012. We’ll be hosting a number of classes where you can learn the nuts & bolts of the RES product line, from the ground up. The classes will primarily be run by yours truly in 2012. According to the wishes of existing and new RES partners, we’ve selected a number of US cities where technical training will take place. Mark down the dates and contact me if you want to reserve a seat. Registered participants will receive information about the venues, prerequisites and everything else, when time is approaching. Read more »
From the Be-There-or-Be-A-Quad-Sided-Polygon Dept! Los Angeles, December 1st. 2011. A place and time you do not want to miss this year. Citrix Systems and RES Software are getting together to throw the largest UserGroup event yet! There’s be 
presentations, exhibitions, live demo’s, geekspeaks, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff to see and experience. RES Software is the platinum sponsor of the event, and your’s truly will be there with my cool colleagues to present, demo, answer all your RES questions and smoke cigars! :-)
Last I heard over 500 folks have already registered, so better hurry and sign up! For more information and itinerary, see Rick’s posting on the LA Citrix blog. For registration, go here.
From the RES Tech Training Dept. Are you a new or prospective RES partner in the United States? Need to get trained in a RES product? Missed the recent invite? Then keep reading, this article is for you then!
Read more »
Tags: Automation Manager, Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, RAMBC, RES Training, RWMBC, training, Workspace Manager
2011, Automation Manager, Events, Fun, RES Products, Training, Workspace Manager | RESguru | 
October 28, 2011 01:06 | 
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From the Alliance Partner dept. Wednesday last week, together with a handful of good colleagues, I had the pleasure of presenting for about 300 SE’s at Citrix ServTech 2011 in Santa Clara, California. This is an internal event which Citrix does every year, to update their own folks on the latest and greatest. As a Citrix Ready Leadership partner, RES Software was invited to show off our stuff and explain how we can help Citrix’s field engineers speed up XenApp/XenDesktop Proof-of-Concepts installations. As the whole notion of profile management is a moot point at that stage, I explained how Automation Manager can roll out an entire Xenapp farm straight from a consultant’s own laptop and showed as an example how our Automation Manager can roll out hotfixes in a matter of minutes. Here’s a few snaps we took during the event (click to enlarge):
Overall it was a great day. Presentations and demo went well, feedback was great, and the ensuing Pool & Cigar party at the Hyatt was awesome! BTW: Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better, the CTO of a certain UK based competitor, made his way out of the building as we walked in. Seeing us, the look on his face was priceless! ;-)
Anyway, to make sure this article still holds technical relevance, I’m sharing the actual Building Block for RES Automation Manager that I built during the live demo at ServTech. As mentioned above, this buildingblock installs all current XenApp 6 hotfixes, valid as of August 10th 2011. The list was based on the CTX129229 KB article. I’ve pimped the module a bit with some nice commentary since then, but besides that it’s the very same block:
Click the brick to download the AM BuildingBlock (60MB, faster mirror here) 
Note: To the Citrix SE’s who are reading this: Just go to the RES Download page and grab a copy of Automation Manager (you’ll need to enter a few details, but you’ll get the package immediately) Before you install it, you will need a database server. In case you’re not running a server OS on your laptop, consider MySQL or SQL Express.
Finally I want to send thanks to all our friends over at Citrix Systems for hosting us. I look forward to training with you soon! Be sure also to check the good Mr. Donahue’s article on the RES Blog, for more impressions, pictures etc.
Tags: Automation Manager, Citrix, Farm-in-a-Box, Hotfixes, PoC, Proof of Concept, Rapid deployment, Unattended
Citrix, Events, External stuff, Fun | RESguru | August 17, 2011 22:09 | Comments (0)
From the Bollywood dept. During Citrix Synergy 2011 in San Fransisco, I was interviewed by the nice folks from Citrix, who wanted to learn a bit more about the whole concept of Desktop Tranformation. Since RES Software coined the phrase back in 2009 we’ve been actively developing solutions for transforming an existing [RES]unmanaged desktop environment into a fully managed, predictable, consistent and documented workspace. We started all this with the built-in Desktop Sampler and the Workspace Designer back in the 2010 release. Since then the Desktop Sampler has been vastly improved, but as something new. July 1st 2011 RES Software is launching the Baseline Desktop Analyzer as a FREE reporting service, I have already written a detailed article about it here. In the meantime have a look at the Citrix TV interview below:
This article was written on Saturday last week after Citrix Synergy. Wow..! That’s simply the best I can currently can come up with, as I’m unwinding at the Gloria Ferrer vineyard with my better half in Sonoma, enjoying a bottle of ’99 Carneros Cuvée, after an intense week of Synergy 2011. If you follow my tweets, or have read Bill’s post-synergy article, you’ll know we had an overwhelming 
response to our booth demos and the brand spankin’ new Baseline Desktop Analyzer cloud-service, which will be available for FREE July 1st. During Citrix Synergy, my buddy Gabe Knuth from TechTarget tracked me down for an interview to get the scoop on this new offering. You can see the interview in details by clicking on the video above.
Parts of the video demo may be slightly hard to see, so let us dive a bit more into the Baseline Desktop Analyzer, or BDA as we refer to it shorthand. It’s essentially a free service to give customers and integrators the ultimate overview of the current 
state of affairs in their IT environments before embarking onto new projects. It doesn’t matter if it’s WinXP->Win7 migration, Physical to VDI, XenDesktop, XenApp, VMware View etc. The situation is a bit like navigation on the high seas: Where ever you are going, you need to get your bearings before you set sail in any direction.
To better prepare yourself for the journey and using DBA, you’ll do well by studying this article. Click here to read it.
Tags: 2011, Analysis, BDA, CitrixSynergy, Desktop Baseline Analyzer, Hardware Inventory, Least used applications, Software usage
BDA, Events, RES News, RES Products, Technote, Video | RESguru | June 2, 2011 03:38 | Comments (0)
Well folks, the weekend is upon us and it’s about that time we head out west to take part in next week’s Citrix Synergy 2011 in San Fransisco. From the perspective of RES, this time I can promise you one heck of a show, as we’re going to be more RES people than ever, with even more cool technology to show off. We’re sure as going to be making a big splash at this event on several fronts and be more visible than ever! Make sure you bookmark the official RES event page. There have been many posts and tweets about this event, so with this article it’s my humble ambition to serve up the good stuff in one place. Let’s have a closer look at what’s going on:
Read more »
Tags: CitrixSynergy, Cocktail party, Event, Exhibition, Expo, Nifty Fifty, Oscha Thai, San Fransisco, Tradeshow
Events, Uncategorized | RESguru | May 21, 2011 10:47 | Comments (0)
From the Events-you-shouldn’t-miss dept. In two weeks time the stage is set in Dublin, Ireland for another round of PubForum (or the E2E Virtualization conference, if you’re selling it to your manager :) If you’ve never heard of this event, it’s hardly your fault as it’s not one of those massive corporate driven events, which have plenty marketing muscle. Word-of-mouth fortunately can make up for that a long way down the road: PubForum is for the Geeks, by the Geeks (capital G intentional) and has been run for years by my friends Alex Juschin, René Vester and others. Having presented myself at this event several times, I want to assure you it is HIGHLY recommended and worth your while: For the bargain price of €350 you get an unbelievable amount of techinfo in the bag! Hurry though as seats are very limited and fill up fast! Read more »
From the What-Happens-In-Vegas Dept. Microsoft Management Summit in sunny Las Vegas is coming up in March, 21st through 25th. If you’re stateside this is a must-attend event, where you will have the opportunity to learn from the experts and see what’s new in the realm of all things Microsoft. 
Again this year, RES Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner, is exhibiting and presenting System Center integration and VDX at MMS. Here’s a handful of great reasons why you should stop by booth #415 or one of our presentations/labs and see what’s going on… Read more »
Tags: ILL, Instructor led labs, Labs, Las Vegas, Microsoft Management Summit, MMS, RES System Center Integration, training, VDX
Events, External stuff, Uncategorized | RESguru | February 28, 2011 15:10 | Comments (0)
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