2020 The year of ….

Well, it’s the first of January 2021 which means 2020 has come and gone. This was a really curious year and a lot happened. In this blog I wanted to recap 2020 on an IT and personal level.

The year of COVID-19

There is no getting around it 2020 was the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am verry thankful that no one in my family got the virus and everyone stayed healthy. I know that it’s not the case for a lot of people and I want to wish them a speedy recovery. This pandemic has had a huge impact on the way we work and do business. And I am amazed at how well everything kept running. It shows us that a lot of people can work from home and don’t need to go to the office. I really hope that we continue this trend and that morning traffic jams will stay in the past. For me the COVID-19 pandemic meant a lot of extra work. Companies that quickly wanted to scale out their IT environment to support everyone working from home. And a lot of projects for new work environments went in hyper speed to finish.

The year of the Portal

Recently a lot of customer we talk to are done with the published desktop they say things like: “we want to work locally” or “we want to get rid of VDI”. These days there are a lot of companies who give out laptops and then tell the end-users to sign into a published desktop environment. And a trend in 2020 has been moving applications from that published desktop to the laptop. A good example is for instance Microsoft Teams or other video chat applications. These just work a lot better locally than on a published desktop environment. But now the big issue is that user don’t want to switch between the published and local desktop. The users are right in not wanting to do so. They usually have a small laptop screen with 2 desktops that don’t really intergrade into each other. What I noticed at customers this year is that users just stay locked into the published desktop from their laptop. And they start to demand that everything works perfectly from that desktop things like Teams. And IT is trying their best to make that published desktop as good as possible. But it will never be the same experience as locally.

So why don’t we just all work locally on our devices?? Well, that’s the biggest issue of 2020. Not all application are SaaS or stand-alone but instead a lot of company software are legacy application that require a database connection. And the best way to manage and deliver these applications is to keep them centrally in the datacenter. Then how do we empower the end users with their own laptops? This is where the portal comes in. Stop publishing a complete desktop and start publishing the application that need that database connection. And put those applications in one simple user centric portal together with local and SaaS applications. A one stop shops for your company resources. For the end user the experience is great. Applications that work best locally are run locally (like teams) and the published applications also just feel like local applications. Especially when syncing data between remote and local applications trough OneDrive. There are some great portals out there like Workspace 365, Citrix Workspace and VMware Workspace. And now in 2020 these portals are becoming smart with Microapps which allow you to perform simple tasks in application without opening that application. If you want to know more about these smart portals. I would highly recommend seeing my customer story with the municipality of Hollands Kroon at Citrix Converge.

The year of RawWorks

This year RawWorks had a great year. We got a lot of new and great colleagues. I am verry proud to work with such a talented bunch of IT Nerds. This year we won 2 Citrix Microapps hack-a-tons with our RD team. Also, we become EMEA Citrix Partner Experts and VMware Master Service Competency certified. Our Mission One has really started taking off. We want to make work faster and more efficient. We do this with smart integration like Microapps with which we created great services like API-as-a-service and our Database connector. Our Topdesk to Citrix Workspace connector is now running at several customers and is improving the helpdesks of these companies, which is awesome! For this year we have a full roadmap of great new thing we are working on and I can’t wait to share more with you this year. We will keep you posted on www.RawWorks.nl

The year of personal growth

This year has also meant some personal growth for me. I started a management training at Mansal (www.mansal.nl) and it’s about changing your own behavior and how you impact others. It’s really giving me new insights about myself and the world around me, which I’m really thankful for. Even though we where most of this year in lock-down I did meet great new people and I’m happy there in my life. This is also the year I bought my first house and moved in just before the lock down. Which was kind of strange moving in somewhere and then not be able to leave anymore. But at least I had really quickly emptied every moving box. And I’m really happy with the house. This is also the year that I also started making a lot more music again and I have even put something online which you can view here.

2021 the year of?

I really hope that 2021 will be the year that the pandemic ends end we can get back to a new normal way of live. I want to whish everybody a good, healthy and productive new year. And I hope to see you all soon in real life at an IT convention!

I hope this was informative. For questions or comments, you can always leave a reaction in the comment section or contact me: