The blog..

Albert Grandville did a couple of interesting blog posts talking about the end of the Citrix Program Neighbourhood and unveiling a little more about what we can expect from the new Citrix Reciever. It seems to going along well and with an expected release in late Q1 2009 it is not too far off.

Ups and downs to the Citrix Reciever:

What’s the upside?
•  The Receiver is the last Citrix client you will ever need to install – The Receiver has a premise based Server component that will act as staging area and control facility for propagating Plugin updates out to the end users. The receiver will periodically check the Server for updates and, provided you allow it, will update with the newer Plugins as they become available.
•    More frequent release of enhancements – Plugins will be released independently and on their own schedules meaning we’ll be able to bring enhancements to market when they are ready without having to wait for a periodic client release.
•    More granular control over what gets installed on the clients – Administrators will be able to control which users get which Plugins and when.
* Note: A standalone Plugins Pack will be made available for those who would like to continue to manage their client updates with existing methods.

What’s the downside?
In order to make room for these changes we need to remove\deprecate some of our legacy features:
1: Thinwire 1 – Thinwire 1 is a low-level graphics virtual channel that was replaced by Thinwire 2 back in MetaFrame 1.8 FR1 (August 2000). Removing TW1 from the Windows client means that you won’t be able to connect to a MetaFrame 1.8 Server with the newer client. See, I told you we were reluctant to remove anything.
2: Program Neighborhood –Program Neighborhood has been around since the early days of WinFrame. PN is a launch pad for XenApp Applications. When launched it connects with the XenApp Server and lists the Apps that are available for the user. PN was effectively replaced by PNAgent (Now the XenApp User Experience Plugin), which provides the same functionality with a far superior interface by integrating the XenApp delivered Apps transparently into the users Desktop. We removed PN from an active enhancement path several generations ago but we’ve been keeping it alive in maintenance mode to give our customers time to move on to the newer and better XenApp Plugin. There is more to the story but I think I’ll post that as a separate Blog entry.

You can read the entire post here.

I personally can’t wait to get my hands on the Citrix Reciever, i have been looking for this product for ages.. i can’t understand why it has taken so long, but i do love the fact that it is just around the corner now.

On a final note i wish you all a happy new year

René Vester