TAG | Citrix GoToMeeting 4.0 coming soon – with added VoIP! |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 30 June 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 The same capability costs US $99 per month with LogMeIn Rescue, and while Citrix’s product is unlikely to be free once released, it’s expected to be a lot cheaper. However, unlike LogMeIn Rescue and GoToAssist Express beta, CrossLoop can’t re-size the other person’s screen to fit on your own, which sometimes means scrolling around is needed if the person you’re helping has a larger screen resolution that your own computer is currently displaying. That makes it more of a personal user-to-user solution rather than a professional solution as with GoToAssist or LogMeIn, but as a free tool it's pretty cool. So, I’ll be very interesting in seeing what GoToAssist Express actually ends up costing, as I’m only helping family and friends and am not actually running a tech support business. However if someone is running a tech support business then GoToAssist Express, while free, has been much better value that LogMeIn Rescue at US $99 per month, and if GoToAssist Express can seriously undercut that figure LogMeIn Rescue will likely have to respond with better pricing, as it is otherwise an excellent product. On the awards front, Citrix has been a partner of Microsoft’s for 20 years, and Microsoft awarded them the 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year Global ISV – Infrastructure Special Recognition award, which Citrix was pretty chuffed about. Citrix have also made great strides with the Xen virtualisation line and recently rolled out its Xen Desktop product, allowing businesses to offer their staff virtualised desktops running whatever flavour of standard operating environment they desire. Citrix’s main competitor in the virtualisation space, VMWare, is offering this kind of service too, so it will be interesting to see how these two virtualisation behemoths compete in this space. Finally, Citrix recently demonstrated at its Application Delivery Conference an iPhone that was able to remotely display a Windows XP desktop on the iPhone’s screen. Although VNC users have already been able to do this, and other handheld devices such as Windows Mobile can also remotely display PC desktops, the Citrix infrastructure is pretty solid with the iPhone demonstrating a way for Citrix to show off and indicate to businesses that all those iPhones they’ll could well be soon deploying can also be used to give staff access to a standard Windows desktop if needed. All up it’s been a busy year for Citrix so far, no doubt keeping VMWare and Microsoft on their toes, shaking up the web and audio conferencing world and having a bit of iPhone fun, too.
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