[author] [author_image timthumb=’off’]https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/540515990371459072/pSLxE7jI.jpeg[/author_image] [author_info]Co-Author: Pat Lee, vice president of product management for VMware EUC[/author_info] [/author]
It is VMworld time—that great time of the year when tens of thousands of our valued customers take the time to hear what we have to say and tell us what they think. And we’re ready. Our development teams worked hard to keep the VMware Horizon innovation engine revving, and we’re excited to showcase what’s coming with our Horizon 7.3 release. Let’s dive in.
Boost Collaboration & Productivity with Skype for Business & Horizon 7.3—Anywhere
Earlier this year, we released our optimized solution for Skype for Business. We worked with Microsoft to create a solution that delivers audio and video either directly between endpoints for one-on-one collaboration or offloaded to a central Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) for multi-party conference calls and meetings. This way, audio and video traffic can be handled much more efficiently.
For example, a local or regional call does not have all the audio and video traffic sent to a far off data center, which can create a bottleneck. Ultimately, this means a much better user experience.
In Horizon 7.3, we will extend support to published applications and RDSH session desktops, as well. This is a great option for customers who want to provide their end users with Skype for Business for collaboration, but do not necessarily need to give them a full desktop.
Customers looking to deploy a digital workspace can simply populate their VMware Workspace ONE catalog with Skype for Business as a published app alongside mobile and SaaS apps. But that’s not all.
The promise of the digital workspace is that users are free to use any device, so we’re also extending support to Linux endpoints. This enables many thin and zero clients to provide a great Skype experience. With all these innovations within Horizon 7.3, customers will have more deployment options with Skype for Business than ever.
All About Apps
When it comes to published (RDS) apps, we continue to innovate. From local printing and USB support to client drive redirection and 3D graphics, we continue to deliver enhancements with every release. With Horizon 7.3, there’s more good news on that front.
You will soon get session pre-launch and linger. Set up sessions to spin up ahead of time or linger even after users disconnect. This means lightning-fast access to apps when the user needs them, since they don’t have to load up from scratch, kicking the end-user experience up a notch.
Published application shortcuts can also be pushed directly to the Windows start menu, making it very easy for users to find and access the apps they need—just as easily as they access a natively installed app.
Great User Experiences on Any Device
Customers who use NVIDIA GPUs can offload graphics processing from the endpoint to the data center and deliver a rich graphics experience on any device. With the forthcoming release of Horizon Enterprise, they will be in for a nice surprise.
Administrators will be able to monitor GPU performance metrics with vRealize Operations for Horizon with a new management pack available from NVIDIA. These include GPU, memory, encode and decode utilization to help make appropriate profile allocation recommendations and tune the VDI environment for best performance.
Speaking of any device, customers can now deploy Horizon using VMware Blast Extreme with over 200 certified thin and zero clients starting at $119! Inexpensive devices that are easy to manage and have much longer refresh cycles—that’s music to any CFO and CIO’s ears.
That’s not all, though.
With support for Samsung DeX, customers will finally get to the promised land of ONE device for both mobile and desktop experiences. It’s a little like a superhero with an alter ego. By day, the on-the-go user gets a mobile experience with their phone. But at night, they can simply drop the phone into the DeX docking station and it turns into a high productivity Windows desktop with Horizon—complete with a full size mouse and keyboard.
