What needs improvement with Citrix Workspace?

The solution's cost has almost doubled this year, and it could be made cheaper. On some occasions, if the screen resolution is not set correctly, you cannot see the Citrix environment correctly. Sometimes, if the aspect ratio is set to 150%, the Citrix environment doesn't pick up on that. The screen looks zoomed in on the Citrix environment, and sometimes it's difficult to navigate. However, once you know the problem and correctly set the resolution on your PC, you can navigate Citrix correctly.

Recently, Citrix has undergone significant changes, primarily due to its acquisition. This acquisition impacted Citrix's value because of increased licensing costs under the new model. As a result, many customers are now considering alternatives to Citrix. This shift has created numerous opportunities for migration from Citrix or VMware to Microsoft and other platforms.

Citrix Workforce is good, but it needs improvement in diagnosing network issues. When errors occur, it is difficult to determine if they're due to network issues, Workspace issues, or environment issues. The error messages are too vague, just stating "connection error" without specifying if it's an IP address issue, connectivity problem, or something else related to the network. This lack of detail makes troubleshooting difficult. We often have to reinstall everything in Workspace, without knowing the root cause. Even after engaging with Citrix and sending logs, the feedback is often unsatisfactory, not meeting my expectations. This trial-and-error approach isn't effective problem-solving. While these issues aren't everyday occurrences, when they do happen, they can be catastrophic for our operations team.

From an improvement perspective, I want to have multiple logins in one JUMP file, if possible. Nowadays in my company, we have to spare one PC as a jump point for the user. My company's purpose is to have multiple jump points. Improvements are required to be made in the solution since, presently, with the tool, hybrid users have to get involved with multiple logins. In the future, the product should have some mobile applications. Though in our company, we can use the product through mobile by using Microsoft desktop, the screen is not that friendly enough.

The licenses are very costly.

Citrix Workspace needs to improve and offer a better QA. The product has some bugs, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The product should have some new releases to deal with bugs that would cause downtime. The product should invest in testing processes before new releases. The setup process needs to be made easy. The product's licensing costs need to be made cheaper.

The product's technical support services need improvement. They have different priority support engineers, including schedule support and case support. The schedule support engineer could be more productive. Along with that, the case support engineer could study the issues in depth and give a prompt response. Instead, they give basic suggestions and respond very slowly. Integrating a 64-bit network directly into the environment could eliminate the necessity for third-party solutions. This enhancement would help users who need a workspace to install components. Horizon provides functionality where users can seamlessly connect via the website without requiring a dedicated client installation.

The solution is expensive.

The product has a lot of background processes running. Citrix duplicates multiple processes. We can see multiple instances of Citrix running in the task manager. We don't get that problem when we use a remote desktop. Sometimes, when the user launches VDI, they click it multiple times if it is a bit slow. So, multiple instances appear. It’ll be great if Citrix can eliminate that.

The solution functions slowly. It takes a long time to load. This particular area could be better.

Some customers find the price to be a significant factor. They have a hard time understanding the extra cost of the services. However, in the long term, I have seen a more stable business due to using Citrix Workspace.

I have noticed that the current compatibility issue with the latest version of Windows 11 is a concern for me and my client. While the client has support for Windows 11, it appears that the Citrix Workspace is only compatible with Windows 10, which does not support the newest version. This is an area that I believe could be improved upon.

We're running into all kinds of speed issues and reliability issues. There are frequent disconnects, and we're not sure whether that's a problem with the product, with the way the product has been deployed, or with server capacity or bandwidth. Our IT department pays attention to that, but we are feeling the impact of that. It also gets a little dodgy when we're having to work remotely. We don't necessarily have all of the full functions that we would have with some of our in-hospital systems. There are times when we have gaps, but that's simply because our IT department hasn't set up all of the applications that we would normally have access to. So, that's not a Citrix problem as much as it is the way it has been deployed. We're pivoting away from Workspace. We're being told we're going to get some of the newer, more robust tools that Citrix offers. That's where we're heading right now. We're not quite sure. We're hopeful that it's going to make some significant improvements for us and make work quite a bit easier, but we'll wait and see.

Six to seven months after we started using this solution, we had an issue when we were using the Citrix server. We needed to install the Citrix Runtime in the server where the application was hosted. When we installed the Runtime, we needed to restart the production server. So, whenever our EMR application was going live, we had to plan to upgrade all our other surrounding tools and applications, so we could complete one restart and achieve everything at once. The engineering team installed certain things to fix the issue, and now it is resolved. There are so many links within the Citrix application, so when we tried to launch it, we initially used IE. Initially, we never had an issue, but when we made Chrome an enterprise browser, then we were facing some slowness. But later, we realized that it was not a Citrix issue, it was some additional components of the browser that we needed to install so that it would be rightly redirected to the EFC.

I think there could be better integration with other vendors. If you install it on a Mac, you get a message to say it's not working properly. I'm not sure why they'd develop a product not supported by Mac.

Performance could be better if there was a low latency improvement.

The Citrix Workspace interface could improve. Additionally, if they are able to provide a mobile application

In the beginning, it did not go so well because, depending on the type of internet service at home, some people didn't play very nice with it, but once we got over that initial internet incompatibility, it worked fine. It is slow. When everybody is logged in, it does have a tendency to slow down. You can tell the connectivity slows down a little bit, but it's still a good product. When you're doing Webex, there are a few features that are disabled when you're working from home. Sharing screens is a bit hard. The screen is grainy. It doesn't look as clear if you were just sitting at your desktop.

Citrix Workspace can improve by being more secure, but this would apply to any solution not only Citrix Workspace. There are times when the Citrix client is updated with a poor release. The update can effectively knock out aspects that were working previously. You can go one step forward, but two steps back. They will go through a period of having some very good software releases and then they will stop completely. It will take a couple more releases to get back everything that was negatively impacted.

I've recently tried to use Citrix on Ubuntu, and I don't know if this is an Ubuntu issue or a vendor issue, but you can't use Citrix right now on Ubuntu 20.04.

They can simplify the process of printers. Printers were quite a difficult issue. It took us a long time to iron this issue out. We have the most simple use case where people connect from home to either a virtual machine or their physical desktop. We tried more complex solutions like Machine Creation Services, and they were more overhead than they were worth for us. I found them difficult to work with and confusing, and they were not worth the work for us.

Performance is an area that can be improved. The meetings that use Skype in Workspace will lag when they run long or we screen share. At times, it is slow when there are multiple users on the server. When it lags, we restart it to get it resolved. If multiple users are using a single server it will lag. The lag when using Skype or Screen Sharing with multiple users needs to improve, as it makes it difficult for us to continue when we have to restart the system.

The application is now very complex. We started with Citrix on PCs. Now, to access the same application, we need to have a StoreFront Server. It's now very complex. If we want to make a clean application, we need to have StoreFront for the web access between the receiver or the Workspace client. And then have StoreFront connected to the Delivery Controller. The Delivery Controller is connected to the database, NetScaler, which we use to secure remote access. In the beginning, we used three servers in a load-balancing environment but now to run the same application, it's on many servers. The price is a little higher compared to other solutions. Big farms need big infrastructure, but for mid-business like us, it's complex.

I would like to see more audio support.

There is no recycle bin, which is a problem. When there are technical issues, sometimes we can't get on the cloud. Obviously, when that happens we are completely lost because we can't access any of our data, but I guess that's a problem that all clouds have.

This solution is resource-intensive, it takes a lot of Bandwidth and a lot of the resources of the server. In the next release, I would like to see it support dual monitors.

I think Citrix Workspace is doing a good job for us. No complaints. If there was an improvement to make on the Workspace product, it would have to do with the communication components. Zoom, Teams, and Salon are not working well within the virtual desktop. So doing something to get the product to allow the video conferencing applications to function better would be the most important.