Citrix Receiver has a large footprint across the enterprise, both on physical and virtual machine. Rightfully so, allowing users access to their virtual machine from a remote location as well as their hosted apps.
Citrix has two different paths for Receiver release, LTSR (Long Term Service Release) and CR (Current Releases). LTSR is preferred by large organizations since it is more stable and offers the comprehensive updates and bug fixes from CR.
So, how large is the footprint?! 338,000 roughly…let’s keep that in mind for now.
Towards the end of 2018, Citrix first announced the Citrix Workspace App with new enhanced features not available in Citrix Receiver. The following three things happened during this time frame also:
1. October 2018, Microsoft announced a vulnerability in one of their products. MS11-025. It affects the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 redistributable package which is used by Citrix Receiver.
2. In response to the vulnerability, Citrix recommended customer to upgrade to the Citrix Workspace App instead.
3. As of this writing, Citrix Workspace App (CWA) does not have a LTSR and CR version of their CWA app like Citrix Receiver.
With an impact to such a high number of systems, I had to decide on which path to proceed. For a while, it looked like Citrix was going to keep both Citrix Receiver and Citrix Workspace App around. However, from my experience over the years I know that won’t be the case for long. And as suspected, Citrix made the announcement to replace Citrix Receiver with Citrix Workspace App.
In my next four writeups, I will highlight each of the areas that were impacted by this transition.
1. Release Cadence: the release cadence of the Citrix Workspace App (CWA).
2. Removing from base app: as the title says.
3. Self Service Enablement: here I will also discuss the auto detection.
4. Cleanup and Compliance revolves around businesses that still requires Citrix Receiver instead.
