Architecture and design authority over the estate for eighteen years and five platform generations: MetaFrame and Presentation Server in 2005, the 4.5 farm, XenApp 7.6 in development and then production, XenApp 7.15 long-term service release, and a rebuild onto Windows Server 2019.
What I owned was the delivery architecture underneath it rather than the servers themselves — the external access path, address translation, firewall policy, load balancing and proxy steering. That path moved from Citrix Secure Gateway with Web Interface to NetScaler Gateway fronting load-balanced StoreFront in the demilitarized zone.
Who was on the other end
City agencies, the Sheriff’s Office, the Clerk of Courts, and the judiciary — magistrates and family law judges conducting hearings through it. A statewide Guardian ad Litem program ran across judicial circuits on it. Employee self-service, including direct deposit, was published the same way.
A platform carrying a hearing and a payroll change in the same session has a different availability argument than one carrying an office application.
The reason it could not simply be retired
Seven Windows Server 2008 R2 hosts carried Access 97, Access 2003, .NET 1.1 and Visual Basic 6 into 2019.
That is the honest answer, and it is a deliberate position rather than drift. Published application delivery was the mechanism keeping otherwise-dead software alive on a supported desktop. The alternative was not “modernize the applications” — it was “modernize them on the vendor’s schedule instead of the organization’s,” which in a government estate means an unfunded emergency rather than a plan.
Priced, not absorbed
It ran as a billed enterprise service with a published per-seat cost rather than as departmental overhead: roughly 1,000 users in 2009 growing to around 4,000 seats by 2020, at $103 to $107 per seat in 2016, $127 in 2019 and $139 in 2020, allocated to each consuming agency and moving year over year as consumption did.
This is the chargeback model in a single worked example. An agency could see the per-seat cost of its own application delivery, compare it against the alternative, and argue with the number rather than with me — which is the entire point of costing a service in the first place.
Outcome
A delivery service agencies paid for by measured seat, and the mechanism that kept unsupported software running on a supported desktop.