Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Receiver or Deceiver?

I’m impressed with the Receiver on the Mac & iPad. Trying out the new Deceiver 3 on a Win7 client (available from mycitrix.com from 24 August 2011) however, left me cold last week. I was evidently missing something, as I appeared to lose a way to start apps.


another examination yesterday revealed that what Citrix has done is remove the access to Published Apps & Desktops, which you could previously do by right-clicking on the Online Plug-in tray icon.


You now appear to have to put these in Start Menu or on the user’s desktop. Disadvantage? Not really. That’s where they are supposed to be for users to access them. As an admin, though, in the past I found it useful to access via the tray icon, while things were in POC or UAT.


Receiver 3 gets rid of Dazzle nonsense and unifies the client approach. Management options increase: the updated icaclient.adm has quite a few settings for managing clients via group policy, and there is the new Receiver Infrastructure which does … something.


Was my initial repulsion premature? I believe further testing is required, as the client was released a week ago and onsite at my client, it has not been tested at all in their POC. I've instructed that it be added to the Production build with a proviso that if it does not work, it can be replaced with the tried & tested Online plug-in 12.1.x Ultimately, the Online Plug-in will probably face deprecation from Citrix. Citrix has a history of quietly disowning their old clients, while everyone is distracted by name changes or new tech at Synergy.


Receiver on the Server?

I'll also be deploying the Receiver to one of my client's POC servers to check if it solves an ongoing “online plug-in stopped working” issue which sometimes happens when running the Online Plug-in within a Published Desktop.


When XenApp 6 got released the Online Plug-in began to be deployed on a XenApp build by default. In the old days, I remember that it was considered by many to be poor practice to put the pnAgent on a Presentation server. This seems to have "changed" and Citrix put it in by default, but I have seen quite a few "app crashed" issues occuring on otherwise working Published Desktops, due to attempting this way of doing ICA within ICA jumps.


Maybe the Receiver will become a panacea for this too?


GrayBlogga