I am so very happy to share that the Citrix User Group Community Networking Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Houston Citrix User Group Community were both recognized and awarded 2016 CUGCY Awards!

CUGC Networking SIG

The CUGC Networking SIG won a Content Award for the content that was shared with the community over the course of the year. SIG Leaders Marius Sandbu and Dave Brett absolutely rocked it this year in webinars, forum, and blog posts! Networking SIG member Carsten Bruns gave an excellent deep dive presentation in the November SIG webinar. You can read more about the Content Award here:

https://www.mycugc.org/page/2016-cugcy-awards-content

We also really want to thank Stephanie Boozer of CUGC HQ and Michael Leonard from Citrix for all the help throughout the year. And finally, it’s the Networking SIG community that drives the content and keeps it the top SIG at CUGC. We have customers, partners, product development engineers, architects, managers, and other Citrites from all over the globe as members of this SIG. That shows how much love there is for Citrix Networking products! So thank you all and hope to see everyone in the events we have planned in 2017. The next CUGC Networking SIG User Share webinar will be on February 8, 2017 from 1-2:30PM EST and will cover Cloud Services and Cloud-based Federation using Citrix NetScaler. You can sign up for it here:

https://www.mycugc.org/page/usershare-ex#NSIG

This CUGC User Share will look into setting up NetScaler as a single point of authentication against Google, Azure and ADFS, leveraging AAA policies to deliver single sign-on to both XenDesktop and other web applications. We will also take a closer look at the integration between NetScaler and Microsoft EMS to deliver conditional access. And, finally, look at NetScaler Gateway as a service and how it works. The presentation will include live Q&A discussion.

If you would like to present in a future User Share webinar please let the SIG know in the Networking SIG forum. The SIG is by the users for the user so we’d love to hear from you!

CUGC Houston

The Houston Citrix User Group won a Local Group Award for highest number of meetings and attendance, member feedback on content that was presented, and overall experience! Glad to see my hometown and several of my friends in other cities be recognized for this! Sean Roland, Richard Maresca, Brian Dunlavy, and Randy Alderman have done a phenomenal job leading the Houston user group over the course of the 4 meetings we had in 2016. The local Houston Citrix SEs have been helping us by taking time out of their very busy schedules with content and presentations so thank you very much Bill Kennon, Ana Ruiz, Kevin Po, Steven Krueger and the rest of the Citrix team! If you know anything about Houston, traffic is bad but we had a consistent member turnout at every meeting. Thank you to our Houston CUGC members such as Kohath Ben-Israel for creating content and presenting. We had so many questions and answers at every one of our events they could go on for hours if the venue didn’t kick us out! We would also like to thank Jennifer Gibbons and George Abar at CUGC HQ over the course of the year for helping us make the Houston CUGC so successful. And finally, it’s the members that keep the Houston Citrix community going so thank you for attending and participating with the group. We have much more planned in 2017 so stay tuned. Also don’t forget about the cookies! 🙂

You can read more about the Local Group Awards here:
https://www.mycugc.org/page/2016-cugcy-awards-local-groups

If you’re a Houston member or a member from another city traveling down and would like to present on a topic, please let us know in the Houston CUGC forum. The next meeting will be early March with a save the date reminder being sent soon.

Jason Samuel

Jason Samuel is a visionary product leader and trusted advisor with a proven track record of shaping strategy and driving technology innovation. With extensive expertise in enterprise end-user computing, security, cloud, automation, and virtualization technologies, Jason has become a globally recognized authority in the IT industry. His career spans consulting for hundreds of Fortune 500 enterprises across diverse business sectors worldwide, delivering cutting-edge digital solutions from Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, Google, and NVIDIA that seamlessly balance security with exceptional user experiences.

Jason’s leadership is amplified by his dedication to knowledge-sharing as an author, speaker, podcaster, and mentor within the global IT and technology community. Recognized with numerous prestigious awards, Jason’s contributions underscore his commitment to advancing technology and empowering organizations to achieve transformative results.  Follow him on LinkedIn.