Thanks Dan,
This is exactly what I do at the moment. However I have been told that JMP codes the binary response as 0/1 and does regular PLS and treats the response as numeric. In the paper PLS Generalized Linear Regression, Bastien, Vinzi, Tenenhaus in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 2005, tey discuss how to do PLS with a binary response and make use of the link function. Instead of maximizing Cov(X * beta, Y) we maximize the likelihood of Y given X * beta. There are several other papers that do this PLS-GLR. So they make explicit use of the fact that the response is not numeric (could also be Poisson or anything from the exponential family I suppose). The end result is still an othhogonal basis for the span of X, but is is derived without forcing the response vector to reside in an iner product space with X *beta.
To me, It comes down to the question of whether PLS-GLM gives better results than PLS-DA. I don't know the answer, but it is more difficult for me to defend the PLS-DA as my modeling technique when I know I'm ignoring the native distribution of the response. It's sort of like fitting binary response data using OLS, which we know is wrong.