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This isn't a stab at teams I'm just not convinced it's 100% ready for vdi.

It‘s not ready, but hey that’s what it is and since everyone wants it, we have to deal with it 🤷‍♂️

I agree with both of you

zoom is great 'n all but its not an actual collaboration tool like teams. The electron based teams is a nightmare to manage properly but it does provide some great features. My current project has used teams for nearly three years and also just enabled and pushed out the audio video capability after upgrading to 1912 LTSR. Audio video so far works well with teams redirection and doesn't have any more or less issues than using audio/video for skype.

Again I agree, Teams is a great collaboration tool no doubt. My wife works as a teacher and during lockdown, here in DK, she used it everyday to share assignments and homework with the students and attend meetings with her colleagues

10,000 remote users on Teams using Citrix, I'd say 90% of the issues are caused by users being thick. Since we recorded a video showing "how to use Teams" and giving them some tricks to avoid issues, we've seen a remarkable uptick in satisfaction. A lot of niggly little bits of behaviour, yes, but overall users are pretty satisfied with it. We still have some stragglers where they can't get audio to work with particular devices and it is annoying when it gets in one of its loops, but I'd say most issues come from stupid stuff, like users having two audio devices echoing or some maniac disabling sound on reams of endpoints.

@James Rankin Any chance you share your tricks for user satisfaction ? Also, how do you deal with device not Teams optimised, like using html5 client but doing a video conf then complaining about perf?

We hads some users in EMEA region state their video would start to cut out after 20 minutes consistently. (remote workers)

Thank you guys, that helps me alot. James Is that Video something you are allowed to share? If not then the tricks?

we've been on teams for a year and like others have said as a collaboration tool its really good. we've gotten some great use out of it especially during the remote work stuff right now. audio/video is another story , especially once we started using it optimized. Theres been a lot of bumps in the road either on the Citrix or Microsoft side some which have been fixed along the way, some still being worked on (ie. currently working w/ Citrix on why the websocketservice.exe doesnt work correctly everytime which puts teams in a weird state).....a lot of times people cant join meetings and have to fully reboot to fix......need to fully clear all profile data for teams sometimes to view shared documents in a group, etc. On top of that even if it all DID work consistently you still have the inherit current limitations that you cannot do gallery view (only can see the 1 active video feed at a time which is a mess when you have many talking) and the pretty bad screen sharing limitations when optimized. It will get there i'm sure but we're in a demanding state right now with users that see all the features on tv and want it now. for that its why we're pushing our company to continue to use teams for all of our collaboration/chat but integrate Zoom into it for the meetings/calls since at least so far it seems to work smoother for us for what its worth

Interesting, thanks! How many users do you have?

@jvitech not sure if you mean Ray or me but just in case we are around 500 users

Yea starting @ 500 but projected to 1000

Teams will probably be the issue which kills Citrix at my company. 😞. The feature gaps (gallery view,etc) and the constant difficulty with audio/video is affecting the perception of Citrix. If I hear the phrase “teams works just great on my Fat laptop” again.... I despair.

@Andrew Gresbach yes it was for you! Thanks and thanks @Ray Davis 👍Reading all those bad comments on Teams, I'll try to delay its rollout as much as I can. If you were using Skype through Citrix before, was your experience better before?

I been chatting back and fourth with @Andrew Gresbach he setup is very close to mine, He has nothing but problem. I wish Skype was a option for us. But they are on the Teams band wagon. I was turned down for Zoom even though i could show more value. They said just open support ticket they will change it LOL. Not that easy

Like we were talking the consistency issues I'm sure eventually will get worked out and stable but at least for now even if they do we're still left with the screen sharing and no gallery view limitations which don't appear to be going away anytime soon. A support ticket won't do anything for that and will get closed right away at working as designed right now so I feel your pain! Hoping our zoom vdi pitch has some luck here because of it

@Andrew Gresbach did you listen to the recent Citrix Teams Q&A webinar? https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops/form/ask-me-anything-webinar/ They mention the teams feature gaps and also gallery view. Oddly, I think they have ‘muted’ out the audio, when discussing gallery view timescales? Hmmm..

No I hadn't seen that but thanks! I'll check it out. That is pretty interesting

I'm in a university/medical workspace with a large VDI footprint (little over 1K concurrent). We have both pooled desktops and present desktops using Teams. Also a mix of Win and Mac's using the latest Workspace App. It seams Receiver had issues with Teams and Zoom for us. The Workspace App HTML 5 client on ChromeOS works well too. Our CVAD build is 7.15 CU5 in production. We haven't seen any audio, sharing, and collaboration feature issues. Now video is whole other item. Most endpoints cameras aren't recognized and if they are, audio/video sync is way off or video freezes. We are planning a 1912 CU1 udpate and in the lab Teams isn't much better. I understand the latest CR and the optimization tool is better, though we are staying on LTSR release for now.

I will have to go back and read the latest CR. I didnt see anything on optimziations are better

Nothing is mentioned about Teams in the VDA 2006 what's new section in the docs

CWA 2006 introduces support for DTMF and enhanced screen sharing, so this is only tied to the client side not VDA

Of course

i've been working with Citrix support (referencing that troubleshooting guide article) and theres stil some bugs w/ the winsocketservice.exe that is a bit flakey causing issue

make sense

Nice thanks for the heads up! So a teams client version update isn't needed for this?

Doesnt look like it yet.

I think I have the private fix they reference in there but the tech didn't give me specifics if it's for the client or vda

oh, ok.

nice looks like I now see screen sharing when also showing optimized on a windows client! thanks for the heads up on that! still not able to give/request control which is annoying but its progress!

I am hoping they improve the features in time based on what we need.

hopefully! for us the screen sharing limitations are ticking off one group and the no gallery view is a whole different group but either way its given it a bad reputation

Sorry I am on holiday.....what do you mean by "user satisfaction"?

in our situation we have been using teams for a year unoptimized (linux based thin clients previously) . once we had everyone work at home the push for video got stronger and since the linux clients coudlnt optimize the video side just yet we had to allow personal computers to be able to connect to teams or cell phones. so they got a taste of ALL the features (gallery view the big one) so once we updated our Citrix environment to 1912 now the VDA could run Teams optimized when they used a windows client at home and now the lack of gallery view became a deal breaker for managers/execs. the screen sharing limitation too for some but gallery view was the big one

We just never let them run it on personal devices. Easy. Any personal device access connects to a Citrix desktop. Also, we've always been very clear about the limitations. I know you always get people (me included) who make out like a particular feature is vital but really it isn't, it's just a pain and involves patience.

completely agree with you there! that always was our stance (no personal devices). we just got pinned in a corner by management when we moved the whole company remote and then they demanded video capabilities NOW (like i said we current have only linux clients so wasnt possible w/ teams at that time). the gallery view limitation i've been warning about going back to Skype even so frustrating when they NOW seeing it and playing like its the first they've heard of it (thats another story though 🙂 ). so for us at least its hard to put that raft back in the box now haha. i'm in the camp that video is a nice to have/not a necessity for EVERY group and at the very least the speaker view is very usable. but once you've seen gallery view along side speaker view its hard to go back

100% agree @Andrew Gresbach after all the fragility of Teams on Citrix to then not have gallery view as well, is a really problem. managing groups of staff remotely, the gallery view is becoming the only feature our hierarchy are interested in. Like I said Teams will become a deal breaker for Citrix. At the moment, we are replacing around 20 thin clients per week with fat laptops, purely based on Teams usage (HR needs external interviews and gallery view is a must, etc). 😞

thats why we're pushing hard to continue to use teams for all the collaborative and chat abilities but integrate zoom in with it for meetings/calls. so far at least seems to be a pretty good sweet spot to let each tool do what it does best and give the users all those capabilities now rather than continue to wait for MS to get Teams get past the current limitations.

Be great to use Zoom but our network security team have deemed it a security risk (after the initial press) so management are spooked and won’t touch it. 😞

we have a kickoff POC call with zoom this morning and that was one of the questions i was going to bring up. i know some of the things they've done since then to address those concerns but to get an official response in case those same questions come up w/ our security guys

I have to say since using Teams it shows what a pile of poop Skype really was

If zoom can make it great in VDI. Teams can as well. It just depends on how much MS and Citrix make it happen.

agree'd.....Teams has a lot of potential building off of the limited things Skype could do. and right to the zoom vs teams thing......its possible but i wonder how much Microsoft is going to push for it when they have their own WVD now. for us we're just tired of waiting and being told timelines that keep getting bumped down the road

As a workaround you might consider to put the Teams Linux Client on your endpoints and let the users choose this local client if the optimized Teams from within Citrix isn’t suitable.

We use wyse boxes now as we're non persistent, 90percent of the physical desktops have now been removed if not all. Nice idea

unfortunately most of our linux devices are old and cannot be updated (igel v5 OS) but we do have newer clearcube (stratodesk) devices. We have chromebooks for mobile use and kind of do that w/ people now for teams web (pretty limited) but they dont like that approach since they have to bounce back and forth between their VDI desktop and that. my thought is if we'd go w/ zoom at least chromebooks have a native app for chrome os so if we HAD to go back and forth at least its a more functional tool.