Modern workplace
A modern workplace — or digital workplace, as it is more often called — is not a particular technology. It means people can work from whatever device and location the situation calls for, and that what they can reach, and how they connect, is decided by the context rather than by which computer happens to sit on the desk.
That makes the workplace harder to run than when everyone sat at a PC in the office. Four questions come back in every project of this kind: what people work from, how applications get there, how printing works when the location varies, and what the licences are actually used for.
ARJ Distribution distributes the tools for all four. We sell exclusively through resellers and MSPs in the Nordics and the Baltics — never direct to the end customer.
Devices, applications, printing and licences belong together in reality. It is one project, not four purchases.
Devices — what do people work from?
The answer varies with the context, and the same customer usually has several answers at once. A shared station on the production floor, a fixed desk in finance and a consultant sitting at a client's site place completely different demands — on hardware, on how the connection is made, and on what may live locally. For some users a browser is enough, because the work is done in the web version of Office or in other cloud services. Others need a full desktop. Both usually exist in the same organisation.
A thin client that does the right things does not need replacing for five years, and draws a fraction of the power a PC does.
But a thin client or zero client is not a computer in itself. It connects to something that runs the user's desktop — Citrix, RDS, VDI, Cloud PC or Windows 365, on physical or virtual hardware. The customer must already have that or acquire it. That question belongs early in the conversation, not last.
The difference between the two is worth understanding. A thin client can connect to several different platforms from the same device, and can carry locally installed programs — a browser, a terminal emulator — added as add-ons from 10ZiG. A zero client, by contrast, is ordered for the platform it will be used against: Omnissa, Microsoft or Citrix.
Beyond that, the choice is decided by how many screens have to be driven, whether Teams and Zoom are offloaded locally, and whether existing PCs can be reused rather than scrapped.
10ZiG builds thin clients and zero clients for this environment, and manages the whole device fleet from one console — 10ZiG Manager, which is free and has no user cap. The devices are locked down: nothing is installed locally, and even the connection clients for Citrix, AVD and the other platforms are rolled out centrally. Users cannot change their own device, and you never need to touch it physically to add support for a new platform. They also have software that turns existing PCs into managed clients, which is often cheaper than replacing hardware as a first step. The standard range includes three years of warranty with advance exchange, support and software upgrades.
And here is an argument that is rarely made but decides what the investment is worth over time. If the customer changes platform — from Citrix to Omnissa, or to Cloud PC — the operating system on the zero client can be changed to the version the new platform requires. The hardware follows the decision instead of standing in its way.
Compare that with older zero clients such as Teradici Tera2, which worked with PCoIP and nothing else. Once PCoIP goes, they are scrap. That is the difference between hardware locked to a protocol and hardware that survives a platform change — and it is a question worth asking before anyone orders five hundred units.
Applications — how do they get there?
This is the part most underestimated in workplace projects. Delivering a desktop is easy. The hard part is the hundred-odd applications that have to reach the right people wherever they sit, stay up to date and eventually be retired — in an environment that is both on-premises and in the cloud through several years of transition.
Some of it solves itself. If the work can be done in the web version of Office or in another cloud service, nothing has to be delivered to the device at all. What remains is the long tail — the line-of-business systems, the specialist tools and everything that exists only as an installed Windows application. That is where the work sits, and that is where it gets expensive when it is done by hand.
And this is where Application Workspace does something hard to describe in a brochure but immediately obvious to anyone who runs an environment. The concept is called Smart Icons. The user always has the same icon, and what actually happens on click is decided by the situation.
On the office network the application starts locally — and is installed on demand only at that point. If the user is somewhere else in the country, the same icon can open the web version instead. If they are in another country, the connection can go through Citrix or whatever VDI solution the customer happens to have. The same icon throughout, without the user needing to know which of the options applies right now.
But not everything has to wait for the first click. Large applications — the Office suite and the like — can be installed on the machine in advance, so the user is not left waiting the first time they click.
You can also set up deployments that start installing a set of base applications as soon as the client is enrolled in Intune — by department, for example. From then on applications are handled per user. The base comes with the device, the rest follows the person.
This runs through Recast's agent, which makes the local installation possible. The agent does not require a company-owned or domain-joined computer — it works just as well on a consultant's own machine. Choose not to install it and the web portal becomes the way in, with access to everything that does not require installation on the device. The icon is the same in both cases; it is the outcome that adapts.
In practice, customers now often give consultants a managed client of their own so that policies are followed. But that is a choice the customer makes, not a limitation in the product.
This is what it means in practice for context to decide. Not that the user picks the right route — but that they never have to pick at all.
Recast Application Workspace handles that lifecycle: access, delivery, updating and self-service, tied to identity rather than to hardware. It rests on a maintained catalogue of ready-prepared installation files, so most applications need no repackaging at all when a new version ships.
The catalogue is not the limit. If the customer has a line-of-business system of their own — an MSI, an exe, something home-built that no vendor maintains for you — the same delivery logic can be built for it inside the product. That is the long tail, handled the same way as everything else.
EfficientEther's EtherApps Forge is the packaging tool in this picture, and it does not require Recast. It captures an application straight from a running system and produces a signed MSIX, IntuneWin, AppAttach for AVD or MSI. Use it alongside Application Workspace, or entirely without — for anyone packaging for Intune, or who simply needs a line-of-business system into a packageable state.
Recast puts the difference against Intune most briefly themselves: in Intune you have to build a Win32 app per application, whereas Application Workspace takes the original installation unchanged. Settings are handled separately from distribution, which is why the same application works in every kind of workspace regardless of device.
Two things that only show up when something goes wrong: if an Intune rollout does not reach the device, the application can still be delivered, from a local server or cache. And if a new version turns out to be broken, it can be rolled back to the previous one.
For an MSP there is a second layer to this. Application Workspace is multi-tenant, built in two zones. In your primary zone you maintain the applications — the catalogue, your own packages and customer-specific systems. Each customer gets a secondary zone that connects to yours and subscribes to what they should have. You configure an application once, and you update it once.
Two things make it hold in practice and not only on the diagram. The customer can fine-tune their own settings — necessary, because an application without adaptation is rarely usable — but cannot reach the core configuration you have set. And the zones do not collide: each zone can run its own version, so one customer's update never overwrites what another customer needs.
Updates do not have to be a gamble. Applications can update automatically on release, or go through a controlled phase where a selected group of users runs acceptance tests before the rest get the version. The rollout happens in rings, and a customer who has to move carefully does not slow the others down.
Once at your end, never at the customer's. That is the difference between selling a licence and selling a service you actually profit from delivering efficiently.
Printing — the first thing to break
Printing is the first support call after every workplace migration. Drivers that do not follow the user into the session, queues pointing at the wrong place, printers visible to everyone instead of to the office they stand in.
Two products touch printing, and they do different things. Recast can map printers by user, device and context — the same rules that govern the applications. Tricerat can also assign printers, but in its own way, and it additionally solves what Recast does not touch: the drivers.
Tricerat ScrewDrivers solves that by virtualising the driver itself — one universal driver on the endpoint instead of drivers on every session host and in every image. Support covers Windows, macOS and Linux, and the RDS, Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix and Omnissa Horizon platforms. Worth noting for anyone who assumes this is only about Citrix and VDI: the same problem exists on ordinary PCs and in Mac environments.
Licences — what is the customer paying for?
Once the workplace has moved to the cloud, the licence cost is recurring rather than a one-off purchase, and it rarely goes away by itself. Users who have left, E5 licences on someone who needs E3, Cloud PCs left switched on without being used.
EfficientEther's EtherInsights analyses actual usage in Microsoft 365, Windows 365 and Cloud PC. For an MSP that is two things at once: a way to cut the customer's cost, and a recurring conversation to have with the customer that is not about selling them something new.
Why through a distributor
We do not sell to end customers. That is not a courtesy, it is the business model: everything goes through you, and we never compete with you at your customer.
What you get beyond the licences: technical pre-sales help before the deal, support through proof of concept, support in Swedish and English, and a named contact who knows your business rather than a ticket number. For MSPs, monthly licensing is available where the vendor offers it.
Getting started
Two ways in, depending on where you are:
- Facing a concrete project — tell us where the customer is heading, and we will say which parts are relevant and what they cost.
- Just getting your bearings — start with the product pages below, or book a short technical call.