Citrix Synergy – Recap

Hi,

I have just been at Citrix Synergy for my first time and I have to say it was awesome. I started the week early with instructor led labs on Sunday and Monday and then had an almost full schedule for the regular Synergy week. You can see my whole schedule in the bottom of this post.

One of my main goals for the week was to network with others that I have only talked to online and try and meet new people as well. To be honest this is actually a difficult task for me, but I did manage to talk to some great people that shared information and insights and I really appreciate that! During my week, I talked some automation with Dave Brett and he showed me some of the work he has been doing on using Octoblu with Citrix NetScaler and it is really impressive. Thanks Dave for sharing!

I also talked some IoT and PowerShell with Chris Matthieu who is one of the co-founders of Octoblu and besides from knowing a lot Chris also shares a lot and listens to input from the community. I really hope to be able to create some good workflows with Octoblu and sharing them with the community so thank you Chris for being so inspiring and helping me get started with Octoblu. After my instructor led lab with Chris and Peter I posted what we did on the lab and my thoughts about it. You can read that here: https://citrixlab.dk/?p=257

On the knowledge side, there was a lot of good sessions, but to mention two that stood a bit clearer to me than the others were SYN306 with Andy Wood and Jim Moyle and SYN132 with Thomas Berger, Christian Reilly and James Bulpin. The first session with Andy and Jim was both very fun to attend and the scripts and work they presented was great and something that you can take home and apply to just about every customer with PVS installed. The second session was great because of the views that was presented and the way it was presented.

Besides the regular sessions I also had a fireside chat session about IoT and Octoblu. This session was good because of the relaxed attitude, the questions from both James Bulpin and the audience and lastly the awesome demos from Dave Brett and Tobias Kreidl. Dave showed of Octoblu turning on and off vServers and auto-scaling of web servers, and Tobias showed what Octoblu can do for home automation.

The keynote session with General Colin Powell was also one of the best presentation I have ever heard. When he talked he was so inspiring, the way he told stories from his time as secretary of state really inspired me and from what I picked up from the crowd everyone else had the same feeling. The way General Colin Powell talked about leadership and how to be a leader seems like something every leader should hear and think about.

If I get a chance to go to Synergy next year my main goal will be the same and after this year I do think I will be a lot easier to go and talk with just about anyone who wants to talk about Citrix and automation.

If you are not following the people I have mentioned here on twitter you should really do so, here are their twitter profiles:

https://twitter.com/tberger80

https://twitter.com/JamesBulpin

https://twitter.com/reillyusa

https://twitter.com/dbretty

https://twitter.com/gilwood_cs

https://twitter.com/JimMoyle

https://twitter.com/tkreidl

https://twitter.com/chrismatthieu

https://twitter.com/xenappblog

My schedule was:

LAB608: Workspace IoT makerspace