I had the pleasure recently to present a session at Citrix Synergy 2016 in Las Vegas with Helge Klein (of uberAgent and UPM fame) on enterprise desktop performance in a session titled: SYN239: UX and the enterprise desktop: like oil and water?. We’ve previously presented on performance related topics with folder redirection, and this year we wanted to take a wider look at performance on an enterprise desktop and how user experience is affected.

This session covers our testing in turning a vanilla Windows installation, which performs well, into a typical enterprise desktop, where performance usually suffers. We covered a number of scenarios, that resulted in a significant reduction in performance:

31x performance reduction from vanilla Windows to an enterprise desktop

The full video of the 45-minute session is available on YouTube and embedded below.

Out of the box, Windows is lightning fast and responsive. Enterprise desktops, on the other hand, tend to be slow and bloated. Why is that? Enterprises typically add a plethora of third-party management, security and virtualization components and implement “best practices”. Combined, these customizations often bog Windows down and impact user experience. But what is the impact of each change? This session will showcase a clean install of Windows, measuring and explaining the impact of each configuration change on the user experience.

In this session, you will learn:

• Which configuration changes have the greatest impact on logon duration
• How to build systems that are easy to manage and great to use
• Common mistakes and how to avoid them

If you’re making it to BriForum 2016 in Boston, we’ll be presenting a 75-minute version of this session that will provide us the opportunity to delve into this topic in more detail and present some additional testing scenarios.