My Next Android App - Group to Voicemail

I have been hard at work (in my spare time... whatever that means) putting together my second Android application called Group to Voicemail. It is available on the Android Market for all Android devices running 2.0 and above.

Here are the features:

• Create and manage Contact groups that can sync with your Google account automatically
• There are currently three action types:
  • Send to Voicemail – Send all Contacts in that group to voicemail
  • Don’t Send to Voicemail – Don’t send all Contacts in that group to voicemail
  • Everyone Else to Voicemail – Send all Contacts but those in the specified group(s) to voicemail
• Create schedules to automatically apply actions to groups
• Schedules can be created for a variety of scenarios:
  • Span multiple days (ex: from Friday at 5:00pm until Monday at 8:00am)
  • A time range on one day (ex: from 8:00am until 5:00pm on Friday)
  • All day (ex: All day on Thursday — will be in effect from 12:00am until 12:00am the following day)
  • Repeat days (ex: Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 4:00pm to 6:00pm)
• Color-coded visual cues to specify which groups are currently being sent to voicemail and which schedules are currently active
• Option to receive a notification anytime a schedule or group status changes. This provides a quick glance at how many groups are currently being sent to voicemail and how many schedules are currently active.
• Temporarily disable schedules if you’re doing something different that day/week.

For screenshots and more information, you can also visit the website I put together for all of my Android-related projects: ForTheGamer.com.

Held Hostage By Symantec

In our Citrix environment, we needed good Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware protection since there will be a huge wave of users inhabiting each server on a daily basis. Our first choice was to deploy Symantec Endpoint Protection since we've already had pretty decent success with the product across our PCs. So, we dove in to adding it to our Citrix Environment.

A few weeks in we noticed some very odd things happening: Users access to network shares was excruciatingly slow. It would literally take minutes to enumerate all of the items in a given folder. Since our Start Menus were also redirected on the network, this meant their start menu would not show up for quite some time. Between this, slow log-on and log-off times and slow access to network shares (a main part of our business), this performance was unacceptable.

Naturally I started down the path of getting support. Now, Symantec support is pretty bad in my opinion in terms of wait times, turn-around-times, etc., but that's a different story. To make a very long story (approximately 3 months in time) shorter, it boiled down to the fact that there is a defect in their code that causes network scanning to stay turned on (in File-system auto-protect) even when you uncheck the box in the policy settings. So, in the end, Symantec acknowledged the defect, but as of now, still is unwilling to create the fix for it, or even provide a timeline for when this fix may show up in a future version. Since we've already had several hold ups on this project, this kind of indefinite wait was just unacceptable.

So -- now we're on to looking at our options. At the moment, Kaspersky is looking pretty good. How about any of you? Any experience deploying anti-virus in a Xenapp 5 environment running on Windows Server 2008 x64?