Chapter 1. Evolution and Core Strengths of XenDesktop^®

A product's evolution, its roadmap, and its performance in the respective industry play an important role for businesses while adopting a product for a technology. We will begin by learning the XenDesktop evolution and looking at its core strengths, which will pave the path for the journey of mastering XenDesktop.

The following is an overview of the topics that we'll be learning in this chapter:

• The evolution of XenDesktop
• XenDesktop releases and improvements across
  • All major versions
  • All feature packs
• The core strengths of XenDesktop

As part of its evolution, you'll learn about the company that owns the XenDesktop technology, the company's vision that led to the XenDesktop development, and it's early relationship with Microsoft, where the company worked on Windows technologies. You'll also learn about the roadmap of XenDesktop, which is part of Project Avalon. A great place containing resources and showcasing a consolidated list of the XenDesktop features and capabilities that were uncovered in each release, alongside with a detailed timeline. This will help you find out more about the releases when XenDesktop implemented a new feature or a few new capabilities.

The core strengths will explain the benefits that the business can reap from XenDesktop technology's unique features. It will enable you to build a deeper understanding of all the core strengths of the XenDesktop technology. This will help you to understand the positioning and the roles of certain components discussed in the next chapter, which will cover the detailed architecture of XenDesktop. Readers with this knowledge will be able to easily assess the XenDesktop architecture across different versions of XenDesktop, and possibly, even the future versions.