Today Citrix Systems celebrates their 20th anniversy. We have been using Citrix at Cuyahoga County Public Library where I work for 13 years since 1996!
Our saga with Citrix started with our need to get graphical internet working in our 28 branches that serve over 6 million patrons. At the time we had hundreds of VT 100 terminals running our library catalog and access to the internet via a Lynx nongraphical browser. We had about 6 Windows 3.11 workstations dispursed throughout the branches that ran CD rom programs like encyclopedia britannica and Stock reports. We wanted a way to easily manage and get our patrons Graphical Internet using Mozilla. (It wasn't called Firefox back then) Our Vendor brought in a Wyse Winterminal connected to a server running Windows NT 3.51 along with something called Citrix Winframe and showed us how we could possible use it for our problem. We eventually bought one server for testing and proved it could work. And purchased Computers for our staff and 500 Wyse Winterminals for our patrons. We were the first public library to offer Graphical Internet in the United States thanks to Citrix. I learned I could publish the CDROM content over Citrix to ALL of our branches via Citrix and we were able to eliminate all the local servers at the few branches we had them at.
We proceded through the years to get the next version of Citrix - Metaframe, Presentation Server, Xenserver and now use Citrix for our Staff to use Office 2007 applications.
We are testing Citrix Provisioning Server to publish desktops out to our patrons to assist with our ever increasing computer management headaches.
The library and myself have participated in many case studies for Citrix over the years, I've beta tested as many of their products, and spent countless hours supporting their products.
Citrix has matured into an outstanding corporation and has evolved with the industry to the point where they are now a market leader in most everything they do. With everything I have seen over the last 13 years I am really excited to see what the next 20 years will bring. Congratulations Citrix!
Here is my Video Congratulations submission:
