Introducing Session Remote Start: Faster logins, more productivity.

In this episode of the Citrix Session, host Bill Sutton and a panel of experts, including Andy Whiteside, Geremy Meyers, and Todd Smith, delve into the latest enhancements Citrix has made to improve both security and operational efficiency. They discuss the new feature, Session Remote Start, which enables faster logons and boosts productivity by allowing physical security measures like badge scans to initiate and prepare Citrix sessions even before the user reaches their desk.

The team explores how this integration not only speeds up the login process but also aligns with Citrix’s commitment to enhancing the user experience and administrative visibility. They cover technical aspects, potential use cases, and the implications of API-driven session management for various industries, especially those with high-security needs like healthcare and public sectors.

Tune in to learn how Citrix continues to innovate by merging physical security with digital access, aiming to transform how we approach workspace efficiency and user satisfaction.

Transcript

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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 1 74 of the Citrix session. I'm your host, Bill Sutton, along with a few other folks that have joined today. 1st of all, 1st off, Andy Whiteside. You want to introduce yourself really quickly, Andy, and say, Hello.

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Andy Whiteside: Just glad to be back on Bill, excited about talking about what Citrix is doing to invest in the product further, and want people to know that we're a partner that's out here to be proactive about getting the message out and here to help. And you know we do all kinds of madness around here to try to help raise the bar around the Citrix spot. Space.

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Bill Sutton: Yes, we do absolutely also from Citrix or from Citrix, Jeremy Myers and Todd Smith. I'm gonna say, Hello, real quick. Just reintroduce yourselves for those who may not know who you are.

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Geremy Meyers: Sure. So I'm Jeremy Myers. I lead. A group of ats is on the east coast, and I have had the pleasure of working with integra for many, many moons. It's actually really good to see Andy and Todd back. So this might be the 1st

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Geremy Meyers: might be the 1st session we've done all year with the squad.

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Bill Sutton: It is.

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Todd Smith: I was just gonna say that Happy New Year. And then Bill reminded me that it's actually February. So

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Todd Smith: I missed the entire month of January with you guys, and I'm glad to be back. But I'm Todd Smith. I'm the Ats covering the Canadian public sector accounts, which includes some of the healthcare organizations in Western Canada. So if you're listening out there.

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Todd Smith: glad you were able to join us.

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Geremy Meyers: By the way, Todd, so is this your 1st winter with the main.

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Geremy Meyers: the the field, the acreage in Maine, the house in Maine.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, it's it's it's technically, it's my 3rd winter, because I bought it in December of 2022. So

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Todd Smith: but this is the 1st year that I've actually had some equipment to be able to actually move snow around which we've actually got a lot of, and got a chance to

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Todd Smith: the the house plans are progressing nicely, though.

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Geremy Meyers: I can't imagine what you're you're having to drive to blow some snow, mostly with that.

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Bill Sutton: Wow!

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Bill Sutton: Very good. Well, it's great to have the whole gang here today. So we're going to cover the blog article entitled In Introducing session. Remote. Start faster logons, more productivity by Manjanatha. Golly from Citrix.

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Bill Sutton: So this is a feature that I can remember probably a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago at a law firm. Talking about this, the Holy Grail, of being able to to allow your badge, your hid badge, or some other type of badge that unlocks the door to log you into your Citrix session. And make it available to you when you come in, or you sit at your desk for a reconnect, which I think is what this is all about to some degree right. Jeremy or Todd.

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Geremy Meyers: It it is. But you know what. Since you go way back, Bill, let's talk about that real quick. So we've got a feature that's been in the product for many, many years, called Session Pre Launch.

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Bill Sutton: Yep.

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Geremy Meyers: But of course, that works as you logged into receiver on whatever device you're on. That's when it would kick off

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Geremy Meyers: your pre-launch session, basically, what it's doing is it's abstracting the logging in. So of course.

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Geremy Meyers: you know you go. You sit down at a desk, you log in for the 1st time. You know you gotta wait for windows to log in. Now, what's great about a physical local PC is you can see that entire login process. You see the whole. What do we call it? Was that the Gina? It wasn't just the Gina, but it was the entire login process.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah. Profile load everything.

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Geremy Meyers: Hey? Listen! You got you got some feedback right? So you knew what was going on, even if you didn't like the fact. It took 3 min. But at least you knew.

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Geremy Meyers: Now enter a Citrix session a lot of times. We abstract that. So you don't see all those things happening. So sometimes folks would click an icon and they would wait 3 min to log in, but nothing would show up on the screen. And then magically, just about the time you forgot about it. Boom! Your your seamless session

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Geremy Meyers: would pop up and off you went right. So we introduced this feature called prelaunch. The idea was as you logged into citrix receiver at the time, it would kick off in the background the session. Get that guy booted up and leave it in a disconnected state. So when you finally clicked

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Geremy Meyers: the icon and receiver or workspace, it would pop right up. So that was the feature that's been around

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Geremy Meyers: for a long time. But, Todd, this is different. Do you want to tell us what's different about him?

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Todd Smith: Yeah. So so the biggest thing that's different here is

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Todd Smith: the ability to actually interact with other technologies through our Api stack.

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Todd Smith: So so as an example, right? You badge in using an hid card or proximity badge, or something like that.

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Todd Smith: that interaction will actually start up your workspace or start up your desktop or your application stack. So by the time you get to your desk

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Todd Smith: it's up and running

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Todd Smith: right. So the benefit here is that you're not having to wait to get to your physical PC, to actually start your workday

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Todd Smith: which can save considerable amount of time depending on where you're at and things like that. But it's once again

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Todd Smith: allowing you to connect that physical security layer into something that's going to allow you to work faster, or or get working faster.

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Geremy Meyers: Right? So because it's api driven and not me logging into Workspace, which means I've got to be in front of some sort of device. I mean, that opens up so many possibilities. Right? So

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Geremy Meyers: I'm just thinking like, tap and go touch and go badge into an office. Anything that can leverage an Api and kick off that access is conceivably something that could kick it off. So in this article here, the way to describe it is, you know. Maybe you walk into the building and you've badged into the 1st floor, maybe on the 5th floor. You badge into the 1st floor.

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Geremy Meyers: you know, just to go through the the kiosk. I'm in my head, I'm thinking, just going to the Citrix office. The idea is, by the time I got up to my desktop, or I've unpackaged my laptop and and logged in my session is already up. It's just in a disconnected state, so that when I press

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Geremy Meyers: you know the icon to launch it. Boom I'm in in 10 seconds or less, however long it takes to actually broker an Hdx connection at that point. That's the

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Geremy Meyers: that. I think that's the Nirvana Bill's talking about.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, that's what we talked about a number of years ago with this law firm was, you know, we they badge into the garage, and then they badge in again at the the main floor and the elevator, and so forth, and we could leverage one of those those badge ends, if you will to kick off a session, and I think Prelaunch was kind of the 1st evolution of that. But

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Bill Sutton: they had that they they could do that from their their device, and log into receiver and log into a desktop. But this is a little bit different, like you said, because it's Api driven. It's really before the the login per se before the user enters their password. It's kind of building it up, building the session up in the background right.

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Geremy Meyers: Yep, yep. So when I was going through this article, I mean, I think. Listen. There's some

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Geremy Meyers: 3rd party vendors that could do this, of course, and they'll build this right in. I'm just thinking right off the bat, like an improvida could do this easily right? I mean, they're already doing this in some capacity now, but this just this makes it a little bit easier. But

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Geremy Meyers: I mean, listen, if you're if you're an it admin, and you've got some scripting chops, you know. You could come up with a workflow that makes sense for maybe what's unique to your business, too.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, I mean, really, what this is trying to the problem is trying to solve is a frustration with with login times and and users getting frustrated like you said with that 3 min login. And then, of course, when that login takes so long some folks will pick up the phone and call a call a support desk and say, I'm still waiting to log in. So this that's part of the reason for this. That's not the only reason, but certainly one item is to help reduce user frustration and lost time. Right?

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, this is not putting lipstick on a pig like if it takes a long time to log in like. I think that's something that should be addressed as well. In fact, I think

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Geremy Meyers: the article talks a bit about like listen, scripts that run. Gpos, that run. I mean, there's a lot that can be done to just optimize the login process in general. But you know, just from a workflow perspective. Like, I think this could easily dovetail into a you know, how do we just optimize that user experience for folks trying to get access.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, they.

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Geremy Meyers: Couple of different.

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Andy Whiteside: We have guys out there, our customers, anybody else that's got a minute long login time.

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Andy Whiteside: 45 seconds. And we need to be looking at fixing that. And my fear is that people take something like this, and they try to make this kind of a like you, said lipstick on a pig trying to masquerade mask. The fact that they've got issues.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, we we have. We get a lot of of what I'd call mini projects where we'll get

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Bill Sutton: contact from an existing customer or or a new customer saying, Look, you know our login times are ridiculous. 5 min or 3 min, or even 1 min. Okay, is there anything you can do. And so we will spend a lot of time like you were referring to Jeremy, optimizing group policies. Looking at the profile load time, which are often the the which is often the the cause. Maybe we're shifting them from a traditional profile

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Bill Sutton: management solution to something like Fslogix or Cpm. Citrix profile management to help help augment or or improve

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Bill Sutton: the the performance. So we spend a lot of time doing that for customers today to try to get the login times down, so I don't know that that should stop in in the in the situation of one of these one of these solutions, but certainly helps speed it up.

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Bill Sutton: A good bet for certain use cases.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, I think the critical thing here is that it? It's yet another tool that can be brought in to help solve that problem right? So if the problem is, you need to get your employees productive faster during the day. So think of it as call center employees

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Todd Smith: shop floor production. Fo type of folks, being able to to get them to be as productive as possible without having them wait 5 min to log into their their endpoint, go through that that go through that entire process, connect out to their resources and be able to do

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Todd Smith: do that job. I mean 5, you know in in some cases 5 min, you know, a 2 min cost savings in that.

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Todd Smith: That's production.

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Todd Smith: and it also allows you to have that connection between that physical layer of security as well as the the access to their their work. Environment.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Bill Sutton: So let's talk a little bit. Next about the article, the article references, how the session remote start works, so I don't know that we get need to get too terribly technical here. But basically, like Jeremy and Todd both mentioned it leverages apis for

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Bill Sutton: session, enumeration, and the log in and log off process, and, like we mentioned, the 1st element listed in the article. Here is just in time. Launch. You're leveraging external triggers like a badge, scan a click of a button on a mobile app things of that nature that generate the Api calls that, then bring the resources to the ready for the user.

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Bill Sutton: Then they they simply initiate their log on using their typical normal method. And it it connects very quickly because it's just doing a reconnect. The session already exists. It's just doing a reconnect, if you will, to an existing session, and this apparently also can integrate with power management, so that you're not.

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Bill Sutton: You don't have to bring up your vdas necessarily early. You can initiate the start of the Vda, the virtual desktop or the server hosting your workloads. You can initiate that via the bad Batch scan as well any thoughts or additional information on this Jeremy Todd Andy.

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Geremy Meyers: I mean. So to your point. That's pretty important in the context of I mean, let's just say you're running persistent desktops and like a cloud, and you're still trying to manage

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Geremy Meyers: costs in the cloud, right? So a lot of value there. And that leads right into the fact that this works with both on premise event as well as the Das service as well, so it can be integrated, regardless of what

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Geremy Meyers: your architecture looks like. And secondly, it's a it's a service. So there is a downloadable install. You've got a stuff somewhere. Run as a service. So that's the thing that's capturing. The Api calls and feeding that back into. You know your Citrix infrastructure. But you know, like you, said Bill, it's leveraging that power management. Api to.

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Geremy Meyers: you know, power on and off.

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Todd Smith: I think one of the other things from a security perspective is a lot of organizations. A lot of my customers, especially in the public sector. Customers are are adopting not only a badge in to get into the building, but you also have to badge out on a daily basis. Right? So this is another way.

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Todd Smith: because it is based on the Apis, you can basically say, not only are we gonna set up your environment and get it ready for you when you show up to work. But also it's another way to ensure that the user actually closes down their session, even if they forgot to do it. Actually, at the physical endpoint. You can do that on their way out.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, it's interesting, Todd. I hadn't actually thought about that. But it does. Does reference that a little bit in here being able to leverage the log out process, which is equally critical. I mean, obviously, if the user walks away, maybe they do, they don't do a log off, or they just do a disconnect, or just shut the top on their laptop and head out the door. When they badge out. If we can initiate a a log off process that would then, in theory, shut down the Vda. If it's a if it's a virtual desktop, you know, full blown single session, virtual desktop.

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Bill Sutton: That certainly could help save money, particularly if you're dealing with a cloud based environment where you're paying for consumption by the hour.

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Bill Sutton: There's a diagram in the in the blog article that kind of shows visually what this looks like. And essentially the the employee bad like we talked about the employee badges in there's the service that Jeremy referenced. That's that's running the session. Remote start service that then initiates the connection, using the scripting to the back end. And then when the user logs in, it's just to reconnect. So it's a pretty typically a pretty quick process.

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Andy Whiteside: And you know, Jeremy, I think we talked about this briefly, and I don't go too much in detail. But there's the where's that service running

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Andy Whiteside: in this solution is shown here.

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Geremy Meyers: So it looks like ideally. The recommendation is a separate server. Windows server OS 2019 or above

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Geremy Meyers: so it's a separate component that you would stick

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Geremy Meyers: not only in, you know, in your info, and that is what the Api live calls are going to. So could be the badge reader could be, whatever it is. But it's talking to that server.

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Geremy Meyers: Okay, got it? Yeah.

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Bill Sutton: It's interesting. When I read this article I

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Bill Sutton: I I went out to the app store and looked for an app that said remote start. But that's not how it works. You can build your own app, certainly cause it made reference to being able to initiate the login process from a mobile phone so that may be something as simple as a secure website. It could be an app that was built by the customer that they just the user clicks at some point.

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Bill Sutton: So it doesn't have to be a badge in badge out. There are other methods. Anything that can generate an Api call a rest Api call to the service. Securely, would be sufficient to generate the start event right.

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Geremy Meyers: Correct. Correct. The documentation Bill. I'm not gonna have you click out to that understood.

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Geremy Meyers: Check it out. But the documentation does a pretty good job.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Geremy Meyers: Of walking through the architecture as well in in terms of like individual components, of what needs to communicate to what? The Walkthrough looks pretty good from a just from installation perspective, too. It seems

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Geremy Meyers: fairly straightforward. I think there's listen. Anytime you've got a

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Geremy Meyers: you're you're talking Apis. You're gonna want to secure that right? So there's some steps that some folks might not have been through before. If you've not had to, you know, slap an ssl cert to protect an Api. That is a step just to be aware of, but it looks pretty straightforward, also works with intra id so not just ad. So that means you can integrate this with fas as well. So it's pretty flexible.

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Bill Sutton: Yep. So there's a quote in here says, with recession, with session, remote start, session, launch times dropped from 60 seconds to under 10,

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Bill Sutton: saving 50 seconds per session applied across 2,000 users over a year. This is a resulting savings and a lot of hours increasing productivity. I'm paraphrasing and trans transforming operational efficiency. So there's some real positive impact. This can have but obviously, to Andy's point earlier understanding what's causing the long login times would still be valuable in in helping optimize this process.

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Bill Sutton: Any final thoughts on this. There's a video in here as well.

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Bill Sutton: there's not much more to cover unless you guys have additional content. You want to cover on this topic.

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Geremy Meyers: You know, probably just one last piece. I mean, it is public tech preview right now. So that means

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Geremy Meyers: Pm, is literally just wanting folks to roll this out. Test it, you know. Kind of work with it. The way I understand it is you can roll this out in parallel to what you've got already. So it's easy to test out and bring some users on and not really have an impact. Production. So

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Geremy Meyers: listen, if this is useful to you. If this is something you'd like to roll out, I would say, go fire it up, and the more folks and feedback we can give pm. The quicker it goes. Ga.

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Bill Sutton: Absolutely all right, any other final thoughts. This is a quick one. Today. Guys.

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Andy Whiteside: I just, you know, highlight again, him, Citrix, trying to find ways to solve problems that that have not problems but enable things that

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Andy Whiteside: problems, not with the product, but problems within our workflows that we've had for years and years and years, and, you know, continues to just invest in moving the ball forward.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, I agree completely. Andy.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, I mean, listen, that's a really good point, because the the whole premise of this is what is the user experience for the end user right? And how can we approve that? I mean, at some point, sure, we can do all the back end administrative things we can provision here. We can centralize, you know, management, all those sorts of things. But at the end of the day, like, what features just gonna improve that user experience for the end user. And this is really what this is built for.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, you all have been making a lot of enhancements to the product around the end user experience, which you know and improving visibility for for Admins as well into, you know, towards the goal of improving the end user experience. So this just dovetails nicely into a lot of the other things you all been doing over the

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Bill Sutton: the past year year and a half.

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Bill Sutton: Really positive stuff.

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Bill Sutton: All right, that's all we've got for. Go ahead.

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Geremy Meyers: Oh, like good stuff. Yeah, that's all I got.

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Bill Sutton: For sure. Good stuff. So alright, thank you, guys for joining.

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Todd Smith: Good to see you guys again.

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Bill Sutton: No, we'll be back again next week.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright! Thanks.

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Geremy Meyers: Alright guys.