Using Windows 7 in iPad? Citrix Says Yes

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Time was the last thing most Apple users wanted to do was run Microsoft software. Well, maybe Office, but certainly not Windows. That changed as the Mac switched to an Intel architecture and solutions came along from companies like Parallels, VMware and others that let business users and other run Windows on Mac hardware. There’s even been some remote “tunneling” solutions that bring access to Windows apps on the iPhone.

Now Citrix is first out of the gate to declare it’s ready to bring Windows 7 to the iPad, which is set to ship later in March.

The Citrix Receiver software is free and already available for Citrix customers with an iPhone, since a Citrix Xen virtualization back-end is required to make this all work. Essentially the iPad becomes a thin client displaying Windows 7 running on a server. Citrix said it has more than 200,000 customers that already use Citrix XenDesktop or Citrix XenApp.

IT managers will be able to control who can access the Windows 7 desktop or even specific applications. “It’s up to them, a lot of companies don’t give the full Windows experience, they can just identify individual applications like Excel or SAP or Oracle, their employees need,” Chris Fleck, vice president of Community Solutions Development at Citrix, told InternetNews.com.

“We’ve been working on this since the iPhone SDK became available and gone through a number of revs to produce a good user experience,” he added. “We think it’s going to be even better on the iPad because screen size won’t be an impediment.”

Go ahead and multitask

Because Windows runs from the server, users will also be able to multitask Windows apps as they would normally on a PC or notebook. The iPad software will not offer multitasking at launch for native software, which has been one of the loudest complaints heard since the iPad announcement earlier this week.

Citrix seems to have a ready market for the product based on user comments at the blog post where the Connector for iPad was announced.

Read the rest at Internetnews.