Citrix Community Verified: Engaging the Community

The IT landscape is composed of millions of moving components that we plumb together to create thousands of applications. We then take the thousands of applications and plumb them together to make systems.

But how do you know what works with what, how do you find out what the problems are. You’d think that this was a simple question, but it’s not. There are many reasons that it’s not simple, one of the main ones is the relationship between organisations. It’s very difficult for one organisation to validate the work of another organisation without a lot of work. Lots of the larger vendors run verification programmes but they can be expensive especially for the smaller application vendors.

Citrix has recently taken a different approach – community verification.

The IT community is integrating applications and components all of the time and Citrix is hoping to tap into all of this knowledge, but also to make it available to everyone else.

“The Community Verified site is a platform in which third party products are added and verified by community members. Community members are helping each other by posting and voting on third party products known to work in their environment.  These products do not get any Citrix Ready program benefits.”

There’s no warranty involved here just the knowledge that someone else has gone ahead of you and managed to succeed, a very valuable asset. The voting system also enables you to put some weighting behind your confidence.

In my experience it’s not integration of applications from the large well known vendors that cause the problems, it’s integration of products from smaller companies. These companies have less extensive experience and who would be struggling to undertake a formal verification activity anyway. A community based approach gives a very valuable middle ground.