WHAT S NEW IN THE THIRD EDITION

WHAT'S NEW IN THE THIRD EDITION

This book is the continuation of the Official Guide series that started with the first edition written five years ago by Steve Kaplan and Marc Mangus, and the second edition two years ago by the current authors. The genesis of the first edition was an enterprise deployment of Windows NT and Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 for a Fortune 1000 company that began in 1998. While several books gave good information on how to set up and administer Terminal Services and MetaFrame, no one had yet written about the challenges, pitfalls, and methodologies required to make implementation successful on an enterprise scale. Citrix agreed to endorse the book as their Official Guide, and both the authors and McGraw-Hill were very pleased with the sales.

In the third edition, we've updated all of the chapters in order to cover the significant changes in Citrix Access Suite 4. We've also added a couple of new chapters covering both the migration to Citrix Access Suite 4 as well as the extremely popular Citrix Access Gateway.

In addition to the technical changes of the last two years, the business climate continues to change. Hurricane Katrina and the Florida hurricanes have accentuated the 9/11 induced initiatives for businesses to more seriously analyze their disaster recovery and business continuity plans. No longer is it acceptable to simply have a plan for data recovery; organizations must also now have a tested plan for business continuity. Fortunately, some of the businesses affected in the latest crises utilized the Citrix access platform, and were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of providing user access from anywhere , anyplace, at any time to disaster recovery centers.

The authors of this book have been evangelizing the virtues of access infrastructure since its roots as thin-client technology. We have been involved in hundreds of successful on-demand access installations at every type of enterprise, from Fortune 50 to small businesses with only ten employees . Even with this broad success, however, we daily engage with organizations that have little or no knowledge of the powerful benefits of an access platform. A significant number of enterprises still have not made the jump from looking at their IT infrastructure as a cost department, to looking at it as an automation and enabling department. Many enterprises are still hesitant to throw out what they believe to be the safe approach of continuing down the familiar (and unending) road of constant PC upgrading and maintenance.

Although this book will speak to those businesses that have not seriously considered an access platform, its text is more specifically aimed at helping those who have made the decision and are looking for industry best practices and practical tips to find the greatest success with this technology.