It’s January. It’s midnight. It’s cold (-10F).

My telescope isn’t bringing this galaxy into focus.

My user experience is dreadful.

As I investigate, I shine a light at the front telescope and quickly see how years of dust and grit are causing my focusing issues.

(Click the image to see close up)

My lack of proper maintenance activities on the telescope just ruined a potentially wonderful night of observing.

When I first set up the telescope, objects were crystal clear. However, each subsequent time I rolled out the telescope, the quality degraded. The degradation was so minimal that it was not noticeable until one night things got so bad that I thought my telescope was junk.

I see the same thing happening in production XenApp/XenDesktop environments.

For example, when a new user is added, a new image is created or a new application is deployed, the experience is good. But slowly, over the course of months, the user’s logon time increases. It increases at such an incrementally slow pace, that the user doesn’t realize until their 25 second logon is now 50 seconds. The increase in time could be a result of a slowly growing profile, or new group policy preferences, or an ever-expanding logon script that supports new users and use cases.

Most of us focus on deployment and pay little attention to what happens next. That lack of focus will slowly erode the user experience. This is why maintenance is one of our core XenApp best practices.

XenApp Best Practice #5: Continuously delivering  the best user experience requires proper ongoing maintenance

Daniel (Follow on Twitter @djfeller)
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