Henceforth with the XenDesktop Connector, you can easily deploy applications in a Citrix environment.

With this release Citrix dramatically improves its offer by answering to the following question: ‘’ how can I use my existing ConfigMgr infrastructure, packaged apps and processes to easily deploy applications in a Citrix environment?” Henceforth the XenDesktop Connector is available.

 It enables you to:

·        use ConfigMgr to deploy applications to a XenDesktop Server OS farm from within ConfigMgr,

·        It ensures that if you are using either PVS or MCS for provisioning, that clones do not get caught in install/reboot hell and that the Master VM for your PVS or MCS catalog gets correctly updated.

·        Once your app is deployed ConfigMgr can then be used to publish the application in Citrix StoreFront.

In fact this release means that, you use Configuration Manager as a central application

deploy mechanism that allows you to:

• Deploy MSI & App-V applications to XenDesktop Server OS farms in the same way you deploy to traditional desktops , one admin can deploy an app to desktops (physical or virtual) in your organization.
• Publish applications to StoreFront / Receiver from within ConfigMgr
• Selectively deploy an applications as an App-V, MSI OR XenDesktop Published Application to Managed PCs

Important note: As this release is a Tech Preview, Citrix announced the following limitations:

• They do not support this connector in a production environment and strongly recommend this only be used in lab or PoC environments.
• There will be no upgrade from this Tech Preview to final version.  They may require you to completely uninstall the Tech Preview, its components and data in System Center before installing the final release.  They highly recommend you do not install this connector in a production environment.
• They only support the connector when used against a single System Center site and single XenDesktop site.
• They only support XenDesktop Server OS (RDSH) scenarios and do not support XenDesktop Client OS scenarios (VDI/RDVH) scenarios
• They do not support orchestrated software deployment to MCS based server catalogs in this release.
• There is no support for High Availability (HA) configurations in this release.

You can download the tech preview here.