Forum Discussion

Senthil's avatar
Senthil
New Contributor II
2 years ago

Onestream access using Citrix/Virtual desktop

We are exploring pros and cons of enabling  Onestream access to our global users using Citrix / Azure virtual environment. Primary reason are, to reduce the .net installation in individual desktops, control excel temples from a central team etc..

  1. Could you please let us know if there any others who are using Onestream from a Citrix / centeral environment ? if yes, how is the performance impact of Onestream vs a normal desktop environment ? 
  2. Do you have any learnings /feedbacks from their experience which you can share ?
  3. Any other items we should consider before taking this path of Citrix / Central Onestream access approach ?

Thanks for your time and inputs. 

Application Properties
Infrastructure
User Interface
  • db_pdx's avatar
    db_pdx
    Valued Contributor
    2 years ago

    Pros: none

    Cons: your users will hate you.

    /s

    On a more serious note, Citrix is a never ending source of frustration from our end users at our company.  OneStream is one of the few applications that does not require Citrix access and its a breath of fresh air.  Citrix suffers from latency issues, connection drops, reduced application performance due to shared resources, and on; people constantly complain about Citrix at our company.

    For your list of target benefits:

    • Managing .Net versions.  I'm not even sure that's a requirement.  Net 4.6 is in Windows 10 by default, right?  Maybe someone with more IT knowledge can comment here.
    • Centralized Excel templates. OneStream is a bit of a paradigm shift (in a positive way). You manage your Cube Views directly in OneStream and either access them through the native client or directly connect to those views in Excel.  You don't need to manage Excel templates in the traditional way and I would strongly encourage your team to begin thinking about moving away from doing everything in Excel.

    I can add, OneStream is still accessible from our Citrix desktops and, as stated, it feels sluggish in comparison to running from a local machine / local Excel.

    I would love to hear others opinions on this.

    • Senthil's avatar
      Senthil
      New Contributor II
      2 years ago

      Thanks for the reply.

      In our Company, we have been using Citrix for various other application and as of now not much -ve feedbacks. But, agree on the slowness, user experience issue to login again to a different application to access etc..  

      Based on our pilot users, all of our users are required to install .NET client in their desktop calling Helpdesk. Incase of a future version upgrades in .NET or Onestream side, this will be problem for all users to upgrade their local instances individually.

      Reason for excel templates question, we do have many templates where we collect inputs from end users.. How do we manage a common ONE version of truth. 

      • db_pdx's avatar
        db_pdx
        Valued Contributor
        2 years ago

        Interesting on the need for the .NET install.  I'm on the Finance side (not IT side) so its outside my area of expertise, but maybe there is a way to identify your OneStream end users and then ensure they get the required .NET versions with a software deployment / package management tool.

        Regarding templates.  This is a common use case for OneStream; those templates turn into workflows with associated forms that can be used by entity (or another of your user defined dimensions).  That way everyone is using the same form to provide their inputs.

        Similarly on the reporting side.  You can create common reports that have parameters that follow the workflow or they could simply prompt a user to make a selection.  This way its 'one version of the truth' but still has the flexibility for different reporting views based on your requirements.  This is all maintained directly in OneStream without the need for a traditional folder/fileshare.  A good implementation partner should be helping to identify and build out these workflows, forms, and reports.