A friend of mine and I (Check out Ritch’s twitter feed here and his blog here) were talking a while back about the iPhone and the adoption into the business environment. Yes there are apps out there for business, but very few and not very many which people would use everyday in business. Now, coming from and IT/Dev background we also noticed a lack of enterprise management utilities that were native iPhone apps.
That lead to a few idea’s for iPhone projects, some of them I can’t talk about right now, but stay tuned I’ll blog about them in the near future. Just think Healthcare, iPhone :).
The first of these projects is an app we are calling Xeni (Pronounced Xen-eeee) and is one of the apps that will give enterprise admin’s and alternative application to help perform their daily job functions. Can you guess what it is? :)
Well, this iPhone application is all about managing your XenServer environment, from the XenServers to the Virtual Machines to the user sessions and beyond, all from a native application on the iPhone. We are not releasing this application yet to the appstore as we are still in the testing phase but wanted to let the community know what is coming down preverbal pike :) and show off some screenshots.
In developing this app we did not really want to bake in a lot of services into the app itself, so we choose to write a few other SOA type services. One of these services, called WCFforCitrix Services, we wrote specifically for allowing access to Citrix based products from the service layer. Since we always like to give back to the community, we are now opening sourcing the WCFforCitrix project under the MSPL license and hosting it up on codeplex. We are in the process of uploading the source files in the next few days so be sure to keep monitoring the WCFforCitrixServices project here for more information. We are adding more features to this project daily so keep an eye on it.
So without further delay, lets take a look at some of the application screen shots here.
| Xeni for iPhone | |
| Main Home Screen | Loading Screen (Splash) |
 |
 |
| Obviously this is the home screen when the application gets installed on either your iPhone/iPod touch. | Splash Screen, that initiates communication to the backend systems to finding out your XenServer infrastructure. |
| Xen Servers Listing Screen | Virtual Machines Listing (Based on XenServer) |
 |
 |
| After the application loads it will display any xen servers configured in your environment. Allowing you to drill down into properties of each server | After selecting the XenServer, you can then see which VM are running on that selected server. Allowing you to see the properties of each VM by drilling into it. |
| Virtual Machine Properties Screen | Actions Screen (Virtual Machine) |
 |
 |
| After selecting the VM you can then see more Virtual machine specific properties as well as perform specific actions on the VM, Access the VNC console, check out alerts, etc. A full functioning management utility | You can also perform specific actions on the VM such as, starting it, pausing it, moving it to another server, or deleting it entirely. Careful with that one!! :) |
I haven’t posted all the screen shots, but I will be putting up a few more blog posts of the features of the app including more screen shots of the addition items. But hopefully, given the app store approval process, when testing is done the Xeni app should hit your iPhone or iPod soon.
As always, feel free to contact me via my twitter feed here or from the comments section (or you can email me here). Hope you guys like it :)