Citrix just released a "small" but important update for XenApp 6.5 available as XA650W2K8R2X64002. Although this is update is only 12 megs in size it adds a bunch of interesting new features!

The most important one is Adaptive display. Adaptive display is the successor to a great feature called progressive display and was until now a XenDesktop only feature. The most important change here is that Adaptive Display is self tuning so you don’t need to do all kinds of configuration and the user always gets the performance suitable for the current user connection. Viewing images and server rendered video are better then ever. How’s that for making it simpler!

Another great feature is Windows Media Redirection Enhanced Flow Control. Don’t you hate it when redirected video is lagging and nagging because your bandwidth suddenly drops? In these situations HDX will drop some frames but does it in a way you shouldn’t notice it. With this feature it should now be possible to watch redirected video even when the bitrate of the video is higher then the connection bandwidth!

I have seen a lot of requests about webcam redirection for other applications then Microsoft OCS/Lync. The answer here was until now, try it but it’s not supported! Now it’s supported for GotoMeeting and Skype as well! Please remember that you need to double check your server resources, one vCPU per AV connection is highly recommended!

So this is another step for XenApp which proves that server shared desktops are not dead and can be a great and "cheap-er" solution for a full desktop with an as local desktop experience!