Citrix user community groups exist in about 60 cities throughout the world. Montreal is a big city, 1.7 million in the metro, 4.2 million including the extended suburbs. In 2017, I met CTA Jon Pitre while we were working at Morgan Stanley, at that time the CTA/CUGC acronyms were new to me, however, I understood that there wasn’t anything going on with CUGC in Montreal. Jon/I talked about starting it up, but didn’t end up engaging the CUGC steering committee till years later. TBH, at the time I didn’t really feel I had much to present , as I had spent a lot of time doing Citrix related work for giant financial industry entities, where you don’t get to see new / interesting stuff.
Fast forward to 2023, I’ve been a CTA since 2021, I’ve done a number of online speaking events, and two in-person events ; CUGC XL in Louisville, Kentucky Oct 2022, and CUGC XL in Omaha, Nebraska in Oct 2023. Anyone who talks to me for 5 mins knows my NUMERO UNO travel destination for work/fun is the United States, however, it was time to bring the CUGC events home!
I’m not from Montreal, but have lived here since 2015, despite having essentially no French language skills, I do love living here, and have great civic pride. So, me and the Guillaume Plante, Eric Hebert and Charles Desgroseilliers contacted the CUGC steering committee over the summer of 2023 to become the CUGC Montreal leaders and were approved!
Guillaume helped find the location for the first event, which was Google Montreal, it was exciting to visit one of the big dogs in tech ! Our event ran from 2 to 5 pm EST with me, and two guys named Jose from Google/Citrix respectively. As per the rule “one of these things is NOT like the other” and to keep with the theme of Jose, I became an honoree Jose for the day (see below) 😏
To start, we had Jose Rossi from Google providing a really interesting presentation on the use of their ChomeOS in the enterprise. I’ve never owned a ChomeBook, but have followed the story of the product for years. I have to say, it’s very attractive for thin-client / low touch OS work in the enterprise, it’s fully certified for use with the big 3 EUC players Citrix / Horizon / AVD. The live demo where a device was wiped / reset was amazing, less than one minute! Try doing that with Microsoft BINBOWZ!
Next up was me ; “Not actually Jose” Reynolds
I did a presentation related to a blog post I’d written in July of this year on “how to deliver bad news” , while this particular topic is a bit DIRE, I tried to make it fun with lots of MS Bing AI generated images to lighten the mood 😉😜 . The presentation got into some a redacted “war stories” format, with some of the audience sharing their experiences with similar IT environmental reviews, which was great
To close, we had the final Jose of the day, Jose Vicente from Citrix…
Jose provided an up-to-date road up for public preview and GA Citrix features. There were lots of interesting features announced, you can track some of them HERE. I tagged a few to try out for clients , for instance HDX Direct (Tech preview) | Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 2308
For a first ever event of it’s kind for CUGC Montreal, we had a good turnout, and we are very much looking forward to the next event 🎉
Owen “Not Jose” Reynolds
Nov 30, 2023
GetvPro 