Registration Begins

Hilton Milwaukee, Monarch Lounge

Opening Reception

Hilton Milwaukee, Monarch Lounge

Registration

Breakfast

Welcome

Grand Ballroom

Keynote: The Great Cloud Migration: Why Modernizing Digital Workspaces is an operating model, not a milestone

The cloud migration isn't over. But the idea that there's a finish line might be. Today's digital workspace is constantly changing. Cloud PCs, virtual desktops, physical endpoints, hybrid infrastructure, and AI are giving organizations more choice than ever in where and how work happens. And as technology evolves, so do the expectations placed on IT to keep up. The organizations getting modernization right aren't treating it as a one-time move from here to there. They're building for continuous change, with the flexibility to adopt what's next without constantly starting over. In this session, we'll unpack what the Great Cloud Migration looks like now, why the future of EUC isn't about reaching a final destination, and how IT leaders can turn modernization from a project they complete into an operating model built to evolve.

The Next Wave of AVD and Windows 365 Adoption

Early adoption of Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 focused on simpler use cases such as task workers, call centers, and lightly managed environments. Today, enterprises are rapidly expanding cloud workspace strategies to support broader knowledge worker populations with far more complex application and operational requirements.In this session, Liquidware explores why this next wave of adoption is accelerating and how the growing ecosystem around AVD and Windows 365 is helping enterprises simplify application delivery and management complexities, streamline user onboarding and management, improve operational visibility, and reduce the barriers to large-scale enterprise deployment. Attendees will gain insight into where the market is heading and the capabilities helping make broader cloud workspace adoption possible.

Break / Session Transition

Microsoft Teams in VDI: From Architecture to Operational Excellence

With the new optimization stack now in full swing, and with the deprecation of the old WebRTC based one around the corner, Administrators should understand the architecture of the solution, how to monitor, troubleshoot and deploy. In this session, we will go over all the critical information you should absorb in order to have a successful Teams deployment in VDI.

Omnissa Horizon Cloud Service Deep Dive

In today's hybrid work revolution—where distributed teams demand instant, secure access—delivering rock-solid, scalable, high-performance virtual desktops and apps isn't just important... it's mission-critical.This no-fluff deep-dive session cuts straight to the heart of Omnissa Horizon Cloud Service (HCS), the next-generation, cloud-first Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform built to blast virtualized Windows desktops and apps to any endpoint, anytime, anywhere—without the traditional headaches.Forget glossy brochures: we'll dive headfirst into the real-world truth of HCS—how it actually performs in production environments, what the marketing promises really deliver (and where the gaps hide), and the honest roadmap of surprises, wins, and gotchas you'll encounter on your deployment journey.Get ready for practical, battle-tested insights that separate hype from reality and help you navigate HCS with confidence.

Secure Browser as a Service on Nutanix: Kubernetes-Native Access for AI and Enterprise Apps

As enterprises deploy internal AI models and LLMs on Nutanix AI, the browser has quietly become the most critical—and least controlled—endpoint. Traditional secure browsers and VDI solutions struggle to scale, require heavy licensing, and often live outside the Kubernetes and AI platforms they’re meant to protect.This session introduces a Kubernetes-native Secure Browser as a Service built on Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) using Kasm Workspaces. Attendees will learn how containerized browsers and Windows desktops can be deployed inside the Nutanix environment, close to AI workloads, data, and policy controls—without relying on legacy VDI architectures.We’ll cover real-world enterprise use cases, architectural patterns, and a live demo showing Helm-based deployment on NKP, browser workspace delivery, and Windows desktop access with GPU acceleration—all deployed in minutes.

Transition to Sessions

Breakout Session with Nutanix

Breakout Session with Omnissa

Lunch and Vendor Expo

Nerdio Premier Sponsor Session

Transition to Sessions

Security Software Impact on EUC Performance

Business users expect modern virtual and physical desktops to run efficiently. At the same time, many financial, healthcare, and insurance organizations are concerned about security and often deploy excessive amounts of security software on each user machine. As a result, performance suffers. Cybersecurity vendors claim their tools are optimized, but the reality is often very different. Discover the true impact through data from lab testing and real-world environments. Use this evidence when negotiating with cybersecurity teams to improve user performance.

Tickets Please: How SAML, OAuth, and OIDC Work

Single Sign-On and federated identity can feel confusing and inconsistent, with protocols like SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect using terminology that changes from vendor to vendor. In this session, we’ll break down what is actually happening at each step of an authentication and authorization flow, focusing on why each step exists, not just what it’s called. Think of it like a beer festival! Where tickets, passes, and tasting booths represent access tokens, refresh tokens, and claims. Using this analogy, we’ll demystify SAML, OAuth, and OIDC and show how they all fit together. Attendees will leave with clear, practical mental models they can use to understand, troubleshoot, and explain federated identity without drowning in jargon.

From Azure Marketplace to Production - Fully Automating Your AVD Images

Streamline AVD imaging by pulling directly from Azure Marketplace, applying standardized customizations, app installs, and publishing validated images on demand. No golden image drift. No undocumented changes. Just controlled, repeatable image releases, making that 25H2 to 26H2 rebuild as easy as flipping a switch.

Transition to Sessions

TBD

It's all about the APPs. What is happening in the industry and why you should care.

The role of desktop engineering has been changing. While European companies have been modernizing their practices, we have seen many North American companies focused only on the hosting infrastructure, for example moving workloads to the cloud and updating deployment infrastructures, while trying to just keep existing apps on minimal life support. Oh, and trying to figure out new AI stuff... In this session we will define the best practices being used today, to modernize and secure the desktop and the apps. Desktop Engineering is advancing beyond just delivering, but also enabling; making it more relevant to the overall IT services organization. This is not a technology specific discussion. Your org might be script wrapping installers delivered through config manager/intune, or repackaging in advanced formats — that doesn't matter. What does matter is the value you bring to your organization.

Break/Transition to Main Stage

UnConference Start

Adjourn for the day

Breakfast / Vendor Expo

Welcome

DEX Panel

Parallels Premier Sponsor Session

Session Transition

Passport to Protection: Entra Conditional Access Policies for Travelers

Ever dreamed of a world where you don't have to fiddle around adding or removing users from travel groups? Well, buckle up, 'cause we're gonna turn that dream into reality right now! In Passport to Protection, we'll dive into the technical details of securing your Microsoft 365 tenant using Conditional Access policies. You'll learn what Access Packages are, how they work, and how to leverage them for traveling users. Join us to transform your dreams of simplified, secure travel user management into a reality. What you’ll learn: - The ins and outs of securing your Microsoft 356 tenant - Understanding Access Packages and their benefits - Implementing Access Packages for traveling users Buckle up as we embark on this journey towards frictionless, secure travel access!

Hypervisor Panel

Session Transition

From Individual Contributor to Leader: Navigating the Curse of Competence While Balancing Management and Technical responsibilities as an IT Director

Transitioning from a technical leadership role into management does not have to mean stepping away from the technology and expertise that built the career. This presentation explores how technical leaders can maintain meaningful hands-on involvement while taking on broader architectural, strategic, and management responsibilities.

The fastest GRC You Can Imagine

Managing and Monitoring Performance in a 75K CCU RDSH farm

This presentation explores how a large-scale hosted environment for tax and accounting applications leverages user-experience monitoring and performance analytics to support capacity planning across a Microsoft RDSH infrastructure serving up to 75,000 concurrent users and 200,000 named users. The session will examine approaches for measuring user experience, forecasting capacity requirements, and preparing for peak demand during the U.S. tax season, while addressing the challenges of operating performance monitoring at scale. It will also cover the development of supporting tools, integration with observability platforms such as Grafana and VictoriaMetrics, strategies for storing and analyzing performance data, and the creation of actionable alerts for both management and operations teams to enable proactive decision-making and improved service delivery.

Lunch/Vendor Expo

Empower Panel

Transition to Sessions

Breakout Session with Leostream

Breakout Session with IGEL

EUC as a Product: Turning Infrastructure Automation into a “Paved Road” for Delivery Teams

Most EUC teams have automation. Fewer have something that behaves like a product: easy to consume, hard to misuse, and reliable enough that teams trust it for real delivery. In this session, we’ll walk through how to take EUC infrastructure-as-code and evolve it into a repeatable “paved road” experience—complete with opinionated defaults, safe interfaces, and operational readiness baked in. Using a real-world EUC edge deployment as the backdrop, we’ll cover how to package automation into modular building blocks, how to design inputs/outputs so consumers don’t need to be Terraform experts, and how to add the quality and safety rails that keep environments consistent over time. We’ll also share practical lessons learned: where standardization helps, where flexibility is necessary, and how to balance speed with governance when multiple teams depend on the same automation. Attendees will leave with a concrete blueprint for treating EUC automation like an internal platform offering—something teams can adopt quickly, operate confidently, and iterate on without creating a fragile pile of scripts.

Zero to AVD Landing Zone in 30 Minutes: A Full-Stack Deployment Blueprint

Deploying Azure Virtual Desktop at enterprise scale requires more than spinning up session hosts: it demands a well-architected Landing Zone that addresses networking, identity, image management, profile storage, and monitoring from day one. The problem is most teams start from scratch every time, or worse, retrofit governance after the fact. We'll walk through a full-stack AVD Landing Zone deployment from cold start to operational environment — live, in under 30 minutes. Using Azure Landing Zone Accelerators, Bicep, and PowerShell, we'll build a repeatable, enterprise-grade foundation — spoke networking with private endpoints and outbound connectivity, host pools, FSLogix storage, session host imaging, and AVD Scaling Plans. This isn't a slideware session. Every step happens on screen, and we'll annotate the real-world tradeoffs as we go so you understand not just what we're deploying, but why. Key Takeaways: A complete, reusable AVD Landing Zone deployment framework across the full toolchain Architectural guardrails: the non-negotiables for networking, identity, and storage before you deploy Live demo artifacts (GitHub repo) you can clone and adapt immediately.

The Cloud Desktop Silicon Problem: The CPU Lottery Hiding Inside Your EUC Bill

Everyone running virtual desktops knows their SKU. Almost no one knows which physical CPU is actually under it, and that gap is costing you money and performance right now. This session breaks down why cloud desktop instances across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud run on a silicon spread that can span nearly a decade, all sold at the same hourly price. We'll cover the economics behind it (hyperscaler depreciation schedules that make older hardware pure margin), the mechanics of it (why a single SKU like Standard_D4s_v5 can land you on anything from a 2019 Cascade Lake to a 2021 Ice Lake host, with no way to request a specific generation), and what it means for you in practice: a documented 26% performance spread for identical pricing, and re-roll odds that are worse than a coin flip. You'll leave with a playbook: how to audit your fleet's actual silicon vintage with a single CIM query, how to use proximity placement groups and host pool segmentation to narrow your odds, when dedicated hosts are worth the premium for a guarantee, and why locking in reservations before mid-2026 pricing changes matters. Takeaway: A SKU version number is a feature-set boundary, not a CPU-generation guarantee. Query the CPU, segment the pools, and stop letting the silicon choose for you.

Transition to Sessions

UnConference Start

Adjourn

Breakfast, Vendor Expo

[Add session description here]

Welcome

Closing Keynote

Break/Session Transition

What We Wish We Knew: A Greenfield Deployment of Citrix DaaS on AWS WorkSpaces Core

Starting with a blank canvas is an architect's dream, but even a greenfield deployment has its hidden landmines. In this session, we peel back the curtain on a recent rollout of Citrix-managed AWS WorkSpaces Core Managed Instances. Moving away from the traditional "VDA on EC2" or Onprem CVAD and VDAs model offers massive potential for simplified management, but the "Core" path requires a different mental model for networking, image lifecycle, and orchestration. This isn’t a marketing pitch; it’s a technical retrospective of building a production environment from the ground up. We will dive into the specific "gotchas" we encountered that weren't in the documentation—from the nuances of WorkSpaces Core and provisioning speeds to the realities of managing identity and compute at scale.

Inside Device & App Redirection: How Remoting Protocols Move the World Across the Wire

A deep technical tour of how remoting protocols shuttle devices, applications, and media streams between endpoints. We’ll compare redirection models for USB, printers, audio, webcams, file systems, clipboards, COM automation, graphics, and app virtualization. The session highlights architectural differences between high and low level redirections,” how devices and applications adapt to virtual environments, and how usability and security shape design choices.

Consulting and Professional Services Proven Methodology for End User Computing Migrations

End User Computing (EUC) technology migrations today are rarely about chasing the “next shiny platform.” They’re driven by structural shifts in the EUC landscape: changing vendor roadmaps, licensing volatility, cloud economics, last minute pricing surprises, and the reality that most enterprises are now operating in hybrid or multi‑cloud environments by default. Organizations entrenched in Citrix, Microsoft, Omnissa and many other EUC vendors are reassessing long‑term viability post‑acquisition and licensing changes. Other customers are actively converting to Microsoft‑centric stacks using Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, often operationalized through third-party solutions to regain control over cost, scale, and lifecycle management. At the same time, platforms like Citrix, Omnissa and Parallels RAS are gaining attention as viable solutions that best align to specific use cases, geographies, datacenter hosted infrastructure, or operational models when compared to 'cloud only solutions'. These migrations are less about dissatisfaction with certain technology and more about regaining architectural and financial leverage. This session focuses on how those forces translate into real‑world migration decisions; not net‑new deployments, but complex vendor transitions and coexistence strategies. Hybrid multi‑cloud is no longer theoretical: workloads span on‑prem, Azure, AWS, and private cloud simultaneously, and EUC platforms must follow users without duplicating cost or operational overhead. Successful migrations start with understanding why a platform change is occurring: cost predictability, vendor risk, control planes, security posture, or scale; and then mapping users, applications, and performance expectations accordingly. Load testing and UX / DEX benchmarking solutions become critical here, not as a vanity exercise, but as a way to validate that a migrated environment actually meets or exceeds the experience users had before the move.

Lunch

UnConference Continues

Adjourn