Three weeks full throttle – exciting & stressful times. I’ve been at Citrix Synergy, then one week at Citrix training prep for CCA/ CCIA exam, last week at the Matrix42 User Group in Frankfurt and three exciting days of our Matrix42 Bootcamp for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop with our partners and engineers. For the whole period of time I was able to use my MacBook Air. Today I am more used to the Mac than ever and I am able to work and play from everywhere – thanks our Citrix Lab environment.
On the one side it was great because I was able to deliver everything needed. On the other side I still had challenges when using shortcuts and working longer periods of time. The screen resolution is great, but 13-inch is stressful for more then 2 hours of work. I thought that 13-inch size is ideal for travelling and workplaces but realized now, that it is too little for me. I am also struggling with Microsoft Office 2011. Last week I was not able to schedule meetings till I deleted my account and reconnect again. Wifi connections are also very disappointing as well due to interferences within the locations I have been. For this reason I will buy my next Apple adapter “Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet” – what a mess. I will also need further equipment to work with a bigger screen, external keyboard and mouse. So my vendor lock-in will continue to grow. But now that Windows 8 was released at October 26th I think it is time to look for some convertibles ;).
Next week on the list: Printer, Parallels or VMware type 2 hypervisor evaluation, Microsoft Windows 7 VM.
Thoughts, comments, ideas how to make it better? Let me know!
Patrick Sauerwein | @virtual_patrick 
VMWare Fusion works well on the MAC. Virtualbox is fair & the price is right. No experience with Parallels.
As far as Office 2011, don’t bother relying on the calendar function for any appointment move/add/change functions.. use OWA. Other than that, Office 2011 works fairly good as a reader… don’t use it for major content creation.