Today, I want to shine the spotlight on VMware Workspace. With Workspace, all of your apps, all your file content, virtual desktop, and apps from all different places can now exist in one location – and you can easily access them by logging into an HTML browser. Workspace is simply a great tool where end users can easily access corporate files and applications in one central place.
Workspace is customizable, which means administrators can make it reflect everything about your brand. Your color, even your logo can be customized. And this is just the beginning. Read on to learn about other key VMware Workspace features.
The Password Conundrum
A lot of people have apps in the cloud, and it’s very easy to work from the cloud. But this can easily cause password problems. For example, for every Software as a Service (SaaS) application – whether it’s SalesForce or pcconnection.com or Concur or Kronos or SAP or Server Care – users all have individual user names and passwords. This is a management struggle when new users come on board. IT administrators must visit all kinds of different portals and sign up the user with the new username and password. It’s very labor intensive! And it’s confusing for the user too, since they’ve got to remember all these usernames and passwords.
Then there are the dreaded IT calls: “I can’t login to my app anymore,” common when folks are using the password and username for a different SaaS application. Believe me when I tell you that this is not how IT wants to spend their day.
All apps available in the workspace portal are single sign on from Citrix, to Remote Desktop Host (RDSH), to Microsoft Office 365, etc.
SAML to the Rescue
Workspace uses a process called Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to exchange authentication and create a trust between the customer and a SaaS provider. Once a trust is established, you no longer need a username and password. All of the communication and logging into the SaaS application is done in the background, passing tokens between workspace and that SaaS application. Logging on one time will bring a smile to your user’s face and solves many password problems at the same time.
