Citrix's sweet MetaFrame Access Suite boosts collaboration for remote users

A shiny new car awaits me back home in the garage. As of two hours ago, my beloved Patriots are officially in the Super Bowl. Earlier today, I gleefully played golf in Hilton Head’s 70-degree weather, while my co-workers slogged through yet another foot of new snow back home in the frozen wasteland that is New York. And Citrix popped back onto my radar screen just in time to solve some remote access headaches for a new client. I’ve got to say it: Life is good.

Personal gloating aside, this Citrix deal is worth a closer look. What I’m gushing over is the new Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite , which is a merry band of remote access and collaboration applications that scale from midsize network requirements right up to the enterprise without breaking a sweat.

The suite’s member applications include Presentation Server, Secure Access Manager, Password Manager, and the highly nifty Conferencing Manager. Presentation Manager is the thin-client application server that we all associate with Citrix. What you may not know (I didn’t, but then I haven’t bumped into Citrix in a number of years and, as many of you enjoy pointing out, I’m stupid) is that Presentation Manager is almost entirely cross-platform. Users still access applications running on a Windows server via an ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) client, but they can do it running almost anything on their side, including Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, PocketPC, or even just a Web browser running ActiveX or Java. This helped me solve a potentially thorny mobility problem using PocketPC PDAs connecting back to central server application -- though Palm OS support would be nice.

Citrix is making something of a hubbub about its upcoming Rave technology, which had me really excited when I thought it was hinting at a huge, Citrix-sponsored party packed with women who could view me through beer goggles. Turns out, it’s Citrix’s upcoming ICA performance enhancement architecture aimed specifically at multimedia streaming throughput. I have yet to hit a situation where I would recommend accessing streaming content via a remote thin-client interface, but that doesn’t mean you won’t, so if you do, check out Rave.

The MetaFrame Secure Access Manager does exactly what its name implies: It acts as the entry point for all Citrix users handling authentication and role-based access to Citrix applications. All this gets done via a Web-based interface secured behind the Secure Gateway Server. All in all, it’s not only secure, it’s fast and reliable.

More exciting to me, however, were the suite’s two client-side additions. Password Manager is the first of these, and does its job with aplomb if not pizzazz. Clients can enter their passwords and associate them with specific applications -- no real training required unless you’re dealing with a complete neophyte or Mac user. Once entered, Password Manager securely stores this information away from prying eyes or malware, and stays out of the users' hair until they try to enter one of the designated applications. At that point a dialog pops up in which Password Manager simply asks if the user wants it to remember the password. Click Yes, and you’re in. Nothing to it.