About

I issued myself a 72 hour challenge. For three days I only conducted work within the VDI POC environment and denoted any time I found it necessary or helpful/preferrable to switch to my normal production environment which is a Mac Pro running Mountain Lion.

Results

VMWare View

Applications Used over 3 days

IM+ (Skype Replacement)
Outlook
Word
Excel
Exchange Management Console
Exchange Powershell Module
MMC AD Users and Computers
Firefox
IE
Chrome

Notes

I would like Chrome for floating bookmarks as part of the base build
- By loading my chrome floating profile I had access to all bookmarks I use regularly. This helped me not feel like I was using a bland machine
There is some anti-aliasing around the fonts. "different" not functionality breaking
- I was running the View Client and running the portal as fullscreen. I can still see a difference but it was something I got used to quickly
On my Mac the toolbar (fullscreen) gets in the way regularly when trying to use the top of the page.
- This is something that wouldn't happen if I was using a true VDI so I'm negating it.
Snip vs Apple Shortcut (just a learning curve thing, no big deal.)
- I had a few issues where I take screenshots regularly as part of my work but the keyboard shortcut (apple + command + 4) was ingrained vs "snip" so saving files locally was difficult
- When I did use folder redirection for my documents and below, it worked flawlessly.
Outlook Search is depreciated (best practice).
- Recommend OWA for email. OWA is my primary client, but it was helpful to use outlook physical as it is better at organizing large amounts of mail than OWA. This was benefit I don't normally have access to on my macbook.
Remove IE and Media Player as pins on the start-bar
- Visually annoying for me, nothing else.
I swapped to IM+ for Skype chat. I don't Skype video chat often but this is a gap for me
- I think Skype is needed.
Remote Assistance (not for me, but others) may be a desire.
- I didn't have a need to ask for remote assistance, but tickets will undoubtedly occur.
Program crashes (sorta) when laptop is closed for 20mins - had for force quit, but may be AP based.
- I found sleeping my laptop hard, and generally after a sleep from fullscreen View I would need to quit the program entirely upon resume and re-open.
MMC is coming in to my desktop, but if I try to run it from the start-menu, I get the "wrong" MMC
- This probably isn't fixable, but for apps that are placed onto the desktop as part of roles and privs, it would be helpful to redirect them off of the start menu as well.
Battery drain when view is up vs local computer is noticeable
- Related to sleeping my machine, but I found my battery on my laptop drained faster based on running "two" layers constantly.
Pandora was subpar, I continued to run it from my desktop.
Lack of a shared clipboard with my mac

Citrix

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