Is the Citrix Online Plug-in being discontinued?

I’m currently having great fun playing with the Tech Preview of XenApp 6.5, which should hopefully be finished later this year.  There’s lots of interesting stuff in it, including new versions of every major server and client component of the XenApp suite and some great changes to the core functionality.

But where is the PN Agent?

Its been called the Citrix Online Plug-in for a while now, but I still call it the Agent.  Its great.  It can make shortcuts on your desktop or Start Menu, plus you can launch apps straight from your System Tray, down there by the clock.  You can use the same icon to logon as different users, change your authentication and session options, launch Connection Center, refresh your apps, or close Citrix down.  I love it.  I’m currently busy replacing all my 12.0 installations (which is full of bugs) with 12.1, which has been out a suspiciously long time with no major updates.

To be fair some people choose to click through the Start Menu rather than launch from the system tray, but without being unfair they are generally the people who don’t use computers much.  The expert users figured out ages ago that the “little blue icon” was two mouse clicks less and have no interest in using the Start Menu.

So where the heck is the Online Plug-in on the XenApp 6.5 DVD?  Does the lack of a v13 agent-style Online Plug-in mean its been replaced by the Receiver?

We’ve investigated the Receiver already and discounted it.  We even built a Merchandising Server 2.1 box which we never used as its only any use for the Receiver.  The Receiver takes away that lovely launching apps from the System Tray functionality and does its best to hide the Connection Center.  Considering we only just persuaded lots of out users to move from the aged Program Neighborhood to the Online Plug-in (which they now love) we’ll be really popular if we tell users that they had forget everything and instead stagger through the Start Menu to find their applications.

The most annoying thing (apart from a lack of official word from Citrix to actually help us plan) is that some functionality in XenApp 6.5 (such as pre-launching client connections to speed up logons) will only work in v13 of the client – which looks like its going to be Receiver only.  I am hoping this is not the case. 

Citrix, are you reading this?  Can we have some information?  Anyway, from this forum I’m not the only one unimpressed by the Receiver’s deliberately reduced functionality:

http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1455633