By Cindy Heyer, Technical Writer, Technical Marketing, End-User Computing at VMware
Did you know that there is a newly published Reviewer’s Guide for Workspace Portal 2.1? The Reviewer’s Guide is aimed at IT professionals who are juggling the management of a wide range of applications, and an equally wide range of devices for their end users. If you are new to Workspace Portal and want to test it out, the Reviewer’s Guide can help you set up a basic, proof-of-concept deployment. To do this, you need VMware vSphere, and to test the services covered in the Reviewer’s Guide, you need VMware ThinApp, VMware Horizon With View, and Citrix XenApp deployments. Through a series of easy-to-follow exercises, the guide takes you on an exploration of some of the key capabilities of Workspace Portal. The final result is that you have hands-on experience with Workspace Portal 2.1.
This guide introduces you to the Workspace Portal administrative dashboard, a new feature that presents your data as soon as you log in to Workspace Portal.
The Workspace Portal dashboard provides an at-a-glance capture of system health, utilization trends, and error messages, as well as details about user activity, application adoption rates, and application utilization.
The updated Workspace Reviewer’s Guide also highlights the newly introduced ability of Workspace Portal to display RDS-hosted applications from View RDS farms. The guide explains how to set up Workspace Portal to integrate with View and display hosted applications to end users. The result is that hosted apps appear seamlessly alongside all other supported application types. Hosted apps are supported by the Advanced and Enterprise editions of Horizon, and both editions also include Workspace Portal.
In the previous screenshot, you can see an example of the end-user interface, displaying applications that you have entitled this user to access. RDS-hosted apps are presented side by side with ThinApp packages, cloud apps, web apps, XenApp published apps, SaaS apps, and even virtual desktops.
In the next screenshot, the end user has clicked the Paint icon, and the detail box indicates that this app is hosted on an RDS server. But the end user actually never needs to know whether it is a hosted application or not. The Paint app appears seamlessly alongside all other applications that you have entitled them to access.
If your end user clicks the star to make the app a favorite, Workspace Portal displays it in their My Apps window, where they can consolidate and organize the apps they use the most. You control the apps that your users can access; your users control the order in which those apps are displayed.
The updated Reviewer’s Guide provides a new set of screenshots and updated procedures to guide you through provisioning apps with Workspace Portal. In addition to exercises to provision View hosted apps, there are exercises for providing end users with ThinApp packages and Citrix XenApp published applications. The guide walks you through the basics so that you can evaluate Workspace Portal for production use.
You can find out more by
- Checking out the VMware Workspace Portal 2.1 Reviewer’s Guide
- Seeing an overview of Workspace Portal
- Reading more about Workspace Portal
To comment on this paper, contact the VMware End-User Computing Solutions Management and Technical Marketing team at twitter.com/vmwarehorizon.
