So today Citrix announced some pretty big news, that moving ahead Microsoft will stepping down development on their Azure RemoteApp feature in Azure, and that Citrix will taking over with a new feature called XenApp Express or (RemoteApp 2.0) which appears to be some further development of their Citrix Cloud offering.
Microsoft will continue to support existing Azure RemoteApp customers on the service through August 31st, 2017, which is when the service will be wound down, and note: New purchases of Azure RemoteApp will end as of October 1st, 2016.
If you want to sign up for the upcoming tech preview you can do so here –> https://www.citrix.com/global-partners/microsoft/remote-app.html
Now even though RemoteApp has had its limitations there have been a couple of good things about it, which makes it attractive for SMB.
- 1: User based cost (Meaning that we can purchase the service per user and not worry about all the other services cost in Azure)
- 2: Azure Active Directory integration (Meaning that for customers without a on-premises Active Directory they could easily setup RemoteApp using their existing Office365 users.
3: Master image creation based upon a running virtual machine in Azure.
Now this new feature Xenapp Express is development in conjunction with the Windows 10 on Azure using Citrix Cloud as well, so I expect there is alot of development focus here at the moment.
Now at this time there is not alot of information available on XenApp express, will update the blogpost when I have more information. Here is the official statement from Citrix –> https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/08/12/citrix-to-introduce-a-cloud-service-that-delivers-secure-apps-from-azure-to-any-device/