TEAMAS

I purchased these controversial running shoes as a bit of an end of year treat.  I have uploaded a video review to YouTube with my thoughts. https://www.nike.com/gb/running/vaporfly https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/50041037

I presented my answer to Login VSI using PowerShell at the Winter Citrix User Group. Below is the link to the github repo if you're interested in seeing more. https://github.com/shammyowens/TeamasLoadTest

As you may have seen from my recent posts on LinkedIn, I have been creating a new website called FootballPontoon.  It is a game you can play with your friends or work colleagues where each player picks a unique team from the Football League, pays a weekly ante and the first team to get to 21 wins the cash.  At that point, you all go back to zero and the next round starts. It is a good game to play and can even attract people who are not into Football as it is pretty much set and forget.  It was a game my wife's work played and I was always interested in her teams performance.  After hearing that it was managed manually (yep, someone has to manually enter scores for each team into spreadsheet each week!), I thought that it could be done better. So I created something pretty good which used Google Sheets to auto download results, calculate scores and then used Google Scripts to send out weekly updates and check for winners. Look at that formula! This worked really well and

I visited etc. Venues in Bishopsgate for Citrix Future of Work Tour 2019 on September 11 2019.  There were three main takeaways Consumer like experiences Analytics Networking Packed house! Consumer like experiences During the keynote, they mentioned how consumer applications like Facebook are very easy to use, data is surfaced to you in the simple way and interactions are straightforward.  Employee tools however, are usually quite cumbersome and difficult to use.  Enter Citrix Intelligent Workspace This product was realised out of the acquisition of Sapho late last year This provides the employee with a feed built up from connections to various SaaS applications.  This feed also allows some basic interactions e.g. booking leave in WorkDay or approving expenses in SAP.  It is built on their cloud offering and includes AI and ML to increase productivity e.g. if you as a manager always approve expenses under £50, it would start to automate this exercise.

This is the 3rd part of a series of blog posts which cover a set of Performance Testing scripts I have used to test Dynamics 365 CE with Unified Service Desk with XenApp. This test focuses on the controller script which is used to launch user sessions.   Below is a version of the script I used.  It has some comments which cover what each of the sections do. One of the fundamental issues I had was how to programmtically launch Citrix sessions from PowerShell.  Fortunately LoginVSI comes with an executable called SFConnect.exe.  This is a really simple application which makes it easy to launch Citrix sessions. If you are not lucky enough to have access to SFConnect.exe, then you could use something like this. https://www.czerno.com/Blog/post/2016/08/26/powershell-script-to-launch-one-or-more-published-applications-from-citrix-storefront-2-x-through-3-6 In the next part I will record a video of this in action in my lab and in the final blog I will look at areas where this c

This blog is a little video which shows the workload in a demo environment.   Below is a sample script from GitHub which you customise to your own needs. To see part 1, click here To see part 3, click here

As discussed in my introduction, this set of blog posts is to show what can be done to performance test Unified Service Desk and Dynamics 365 CE. These tests are more designed to identified the client side impact of using USD.  It can be a very CPU intensive program and depending on your configuration on CE, some of the pages can take a while to load and/or use up a lot of client side resource. Below is a screenshot of the hardware requirements for USD Microsoft provide some hardware recommendations, but when running this in a Server Based Computing environment such as Citrix XenApp, it is unlikely you are going to give every user 2 dedicated CPUs without some pooling. The other thing to bear in mind is that USD uses embedded iexplore.exe processes for its frames.  We all know that IE sucks, but specifically with JavaScript and DOM Storage performance, which Dynamics uses a lot of. Microsoft know this and if they could burn IE to the ground I am sure they would, bu

Recently I had to perform some performance testing for a Citrix XenApp environment as part of an upcoming upgrade to our Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement application.  We wanted to ensure that this CE upgrade didn't affect the user density on our Citrix servers. This workload is for our Customer Service Advisors who use Aspect Unified Agent Desktop (UAD) to receive calls integrated into Microsoft Unified Service Desk (USD) to present caller information and a method of completing workflows through Dynamics 365 CE. We would usually complete this task with LoginVSI.  It is a tool we have available to us and have used in the past.  We even have a basic custom workload for the above scenario. We were having a problem with a licence lapsing with the product and also, I wanted a bit more control over the workload and some of it's outputs. So the next best option was creating a set of PowerShell Scripts to complete these tasks. At a high level, I had a single launcher Virtual

Azure seemingly has endless possibilities and options. Sometimes it is difficult to see the wood through the trees.  The capabilities for techies are mouthwatering but the cost control (or lack thereof) is a constant headache for managers or those who hold the purse strings. It is very easy to accumulate spend if resources are not being managed in the correct way e.g. keeping VMs on when they are not required, having resources set to the incorrect scale or resources being created for testing and never being deleted. There are some quite in depth solutions to cost control in Azure but at an organisation which isn't cloud native, you need to learn to walk before you can run.  Quota management for Enterprise Agreements can help, but this will just report on issues after the problem has occurred. Whilst transitioning support for some Azure Subscriptions to an internal IT team, an IT manager asked me whether there was a way to simple see the resources created, updated or star