VMworld 2016, What's new in EUC?

Yep, again a great week full of announcements, networking, technical sessions, parties and fun with the ITQ team. VMworld 2016, the Barcelona Edition is yet again a blast!

Last Friday I attended a Citrix Usergroup event in the Netherlands. Lot’s of great community people and speakers. One of those speakers was Shawn Bass, the CTO for VMware’s EUC products. After his session about the VMware ecosystem and his vision around the Digital Workspace, I spoke to him about VMworld. I asked him if he was excited about VMworld and his answer was “I have been working on a great new EUC innovation for the past year and I am going to announce it next to Sanjay Poonen during the keynote on Wednesday, so I am very excited!”.

Skype for Business

During todays keynote it was clear that he was right. The evolution of the Digital Workspace in full force as he announced the new integration between Horizon and Skype for Business. A new virtual channel has been created that allows for endpoints to have a peer-to-peer connection that can be offloaded to the physical endpoint for media processing.

The next picture shows an outline of the current integration and the new integration:

Furthermore, a video has been released that shows some more information on the integration:

It is possible to sign up to a Tech Preview at the following link.

Workspace ONE Essentials

Workspace ONE Essentials is a new entry-level edition into the digital workspace. At $4 per user per month, Workspace ONE Essentials provides users with a unified catalog for single sign-on (SSO) access to web and mobile applications on unmanaged devices. This new offering packages many existing Workspace ONE capabilities into a new offering with the following capabilities:

Self-service app catalog/launcher: Unified access to web or public native mobile apps.
SSO with basic conditional access: SSO access to applications and secure conditional access rules based on user, device type, network location and/or authentication strength.
Integrated multi-factor authentication: Enforce two-factor authentication on apps with VMware Verify, giving workers one-touch simplicity on their mobile phones.
Usage reporting and analytics: Gain insight into what users are accessing via which applications and how often.

The following figure shows the different offerings and their specific features:

Secure Access to Office 365

Like the Skype for Business integration, VMware and Microsoft are heavily working together to enhance each others products. Office 365 and Workspace ONE are other examples of that integration. The following new features will be added to Workspace ONE and Office 365 to enhance the to product when using them in conjunction:

Automatic de-provisioning of Office 365 or G Suite (previously Google Apps) accounts when an employee leaves the company. By automating the de-provisioning of accounts, even an authenticated user with a valid token will be rejected access once the user is deactivated in Active Directory.
Step-up, two-factor authentication with VMware Verify: Organizations can require two-factor authentication when end users access secure apps. With the VMware Verify app, included in Workspace ONE, two-factor authentication approval is just one swipe away using of mobile push notifications.
Adaptive Management: Using Workspace ONE, organizations can block access to apps like Office 365 from unmanaged devices. Using consumer-simple workflows, we streamlined end-user enrollment to access apps. Once enrolled, IT benefits from device compliance checks and enterprise wipe.
Prevent access from noncompliant devices: If a device becomes noncompliant, access can be immediately removed. This is important in cases where devices are jailbroken and/or rooted or if a user tries to disable passcodes on their device.
Data Leakage Protection (DLP): Leveraging native platform controls to containerize apps, you can encrypt data, inhibit moving of emails, prevent users from opening attachments in personal apps and set DLP policies, such as restricting copy/paste and open-in controls.

The following figure shows the enhanced security features:

The following video shows a demo of the Office 365 integration:

Like the review of VMworld 2016 Las Vegas, I will write a review of the Barcelona edition as well. So follow me on twitter to get an update when it will be available.