Of course this is not real shocking news at all. Both XenApp and Citrix Workflow Studio were announced at the Citrix Summit two weeks ago and were faithfully "leaked" to the web.

The renaming of Presentation Server to XenApp is almost embarrassing in that I have never seen a company feeling the need to rename their flagship product so often in such little time. Sometimes I think that Citrix suffers from some form of identity crisis. However, when you think about it, it kind of makes sense. First of all, the mere investment made in XenSource by Citrix should justify the next 5 renames and then some. If the Xen-label would not have been applied to Presentation Server would be the equivalent of buying a Ferrari and parking it in a swamp... or something like that, you get the idea.

Of course the new name for Presentation Server also makes a lot of sense from the point of view of a name of product actually reflecting the capabilities of that product. Presentation Server has become synonymous with delivering applications in a Server Based Computing manner (from Terminal Servers). With the introduction of Citrix Application Isolation Environments in Presentation Server 4.0 and with Citrix Application Streaming in Presentation Server 4.5, Citrix moved away from just delivering applications from Terminal Servers. Although I truly believe that Citrix' (surprisingly late) entry into the (desktop) application virtualization and streaming market was carefully orchestrated in conjunction with their buddy Microsoft, I also think that Citrix is currently somewhat disappointed with the adoption of Citrix Application Streaming so far. So with the birth or Citrix XenApp, Citrix is able to reintroduce their flagship as a product that does Server application and Desktop application delivery, both to new as well as existing customers and partners. I think this will turn out to be a smart move.

As far as Citrix Workflow studio goes, this is currently in a Partner Preview phase. This means that only Citrix partners are able to download this tech preview and play with it. Supposedly this would mean that this is NDA material and can not be (re)posted. However, Rich Crusco at FrameWork.com has republished part of the early documentation of Citrix Workflow Studio. Since Rich is a proud employee of Citrix' Partner of the year, Entisys, I am assuming that Citrix is OK with him posting this material. 

This screenshot reveals some of the magic that Citrix Workflow Studio is supposed to deliver. Using .NET and Windows Powershell (1.0) Citrix Workflow Studio is supposed to be able unify almost the entire range of Citrix Products under one umbrella. Of course not every single configuration item will be able to be leveraged from Citrix Workflow Studio but most important tasks can supposedly done using Citrix Workflow Studio. In Q2 a Citrix Workflow Studio Tech Preview should be available to the rest of the world.