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Finding Answers for Installation Difficulties

Today David Johnson from Adobe Customer Care discusses some of the happenings for installers and licensing from the customer care point of view. David's experience with customers and input from the Adobe Creative Suite 3 installation problems helped us fix the bugs that were causing retail customers the most problems in CS3. This helped significantly reduce customer support calls for CS4 installation issues. David also goes through some of the tools to help users help themselves when installation failures occur. --Eric

With the release of every product, inevitably customers will encounter some problems. Adobe Customer Care strives to provide support for current issues and to ensure that problems are addressed in future releases of our software. I am a member of the Technical Response Team, and we are the liaison between tech support agents around the globe and the engineering teams. We handle escalations, collect and analyze call trends to provide feedback to product teams on top issues.

With the Adobe Creative Suite 4 products, we greatly improved messaging around installation errors. If an installation wasn’t completely successful, you will see a dialog box with the error message encountered during the installation. The error message allows you to search for solutions in our Knowledge Base, http://www.adobe.com/support/. We are constantly creating and updating support documentation on the latest issues.

We also introduced a new tool with the Adobe Creative Suite 4 products that increases your ability to find resolutions to installation problems. In the ‘More Information’ dialog at the end of a failed or partial installation you can click Get Support. The Get Support option directs you to a tool called the Adobe Support Advisor (ASA), http://www.adobe.com/go/loganalyzer . The ASA tool is designed to analyze Adobe Creative Suite 3 and 4 logs on your machine and to display any known technical support documentation for your issue. This allows you to find solutions to your installation problem without having to search the support site or contacting Adobe Customer Care.

We recognize that we have not documented every installation problem (yet), but the ASA tool has a ‘Package for Support’ option that allows you to upload a package to Customer Care which can help us identify the source of your installation failure. The package contains your installation log file, the search results we found (which includes information on unknown issues), and a basic system information file. This information is assigned a unique token that only Adobe employees have access to.

When you exit the ASA tool you are also prompted to report the found issues to Adobe. If you click okay to accept, a small file containing statistical data about the failures you encountered during the installation process is submitted. The statistical data in that file cannot be linked to an individual machine and is intended to provide us with information on common failures.

The Technical Response Team is updating the ASA tool frequently to provide solutions for the issues we are seeing. Both Eric Wilde’s engineering team and the Technical Response Team are committed to eliminate known installation failures and the Adobe Support Advisor is a great tool that can get us there.

David Johnson
Technical Response Team

Comments

simply WOW!
Brains, man, Brains!
Great to hear bout the improvements!

Any links to the full install of Acrobat Reader 9.1? Why must I go through the "Download Manager"? It doesn't work correctly on two different systems.

One big wish; Please let me update users CS3/CS4/CS5/VCS6 etc. WITHOUT BEING AN ADMIN! Just do as every 1 000 000 other programs do; just authenticate as an admin okey? Why on god gray earth do i have to BE and admin to upgrade?!?!?!

Are you sure these two are right?

AdobeAcrobat9Core-sv_SE - This is the core payload for Acrobat 9 Pro for Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Ukranian. Without this payload, Acrobat 9 Pro will not be installed for the given locales. Note that the Mac Acrobat 9 Pro build has fewer locales supported and so only has a single, multilingual installer.

AdobeAcrobat9Core-ru_RU - This is the core payload for Acrobat 9 Pro for Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish. Without this payload, Acrobat 9 Pro will not be installed for the given locales. Note that the Mac Acrobat 9 Pro build has fewer locales supported and so only has a single, multilingual installer.

Looks to me that they should switch places.. : )

Piero wrote: One big wish; Please let me update users CS3/CS4/CS5/VCS6 etc. WITHOUT BEING AN ADMIN!

Yes, this makes sense. I'll get this added to our list of what we should accomplish in the upcoming Updater implementation. I'm not sure the change can actually make our schedule; but, it should at least get added to what we should try to accomplish.

Are you sure these two are right?

AdobeAcrobat9Core-sv_SE ...

Thanks for catching this. Its a cut a paste error. Fixing now.

Great!

This is a major pain for me, i can't upgrade CS3 without loggin in and out client/admin.

Therefor i have not updated all our CS3 to CS4.

;)

Thanks, that would be greatly apreciated by me and many others.

Sorry for screaming, i was frustrated.. :)

I cannot install ASA.
while installing it shows error message with number Error# 2032

vjshvj writes: I cannot install ASA.
while installing it shows error message with number Error# 2032

I'll follow up in email. This is an AIR installation error and we may need to get the AIR team involved.

While installing ACS4,the first disk will not eject so that disk 2 can be inserted as prompted. There are no error codes. This happened on both attempts to install. The DVD player works otherwise. No problems with DVD reader/writer any other time. Strange?!?
Thanks, Monica

I've got the same problem as Monica (19 June 2009). When installing CS4, it prompts me to insert disk 2, but won't let me remove disk 1 (duh)!

Bradley,

I've created a customer service case for you and will email you the details.

Monica,

Sorry, I somehow missed your comment back in June. If you're still having a problem please let me know. You can email me directly at ewilde@adobe.com.

Can you get this font any smaller? What is this, hard coded to 7 pts? Please activate the Font size change using the mouse wheel and, while you are at it, let the window resize. What is this, fixed for 800x600?

This is the first I heard of someone seeing this blog in a small point size. I'm seeing it in 11 pts myself. Its just the default CSS for our corporate blogs, let me check to see what the font size is.

I've been searching, but haven't found this question addressed.

I have Dreamweaver 8 and am finally considering upgrading to Dreamweaver CS4. I just downloaded the trial version, so I can take a test drive.

However, I'm concerned that installing the DW-CS4 trial will somehow mess up my DW8 installation.

My DW8 is working perfectly, and I can't really afford to mess it up, as I'm in the midst of some projects.

Can anyone say, with any certainty, that installing the DW CS4 trial will or will not cause me problems?

Thanks!

Melissa

We did do coexistence testing with CS3 and DW 8, not with CS4 and DW 8. In general I expect it to work; but, it hasn't been thoroughly tested. We have seen customer issues with using upgrade serial numbers from DW 8 (or Studio 8) to CS3 or CS4; but, I've not heard of actual functional problems.

Another area where we've seen problems with CS4 trial installs is if the user installs trial in one language (say US English) and then serializes for a different language (say International English.) Please make sure that if you do purchase CS4 that you use the correct languages for both trial and serializing.

i'm running on vista home premium, my laptop is strong and able to run powerful softwares and games.. so it does meet the requirements

i've installed CS3 , after it's done, this message shows up:

Errors: 2 Components

Adobe DreamWeaver CS3
Component install failed

Shared Components
Component install failed


and so is the CS4 , after isntalling SUCCESFULLY, when i try to run the Application [ Clicking Dreamweaver.exe ] Nothings happen

I've tried to run a portable version, an error message shows up: a dll file is not found

I'm gonna get crazy >_

PLEASE HELP ME AS FAST AS YOU CAN! I CAN'T LIVE ONE DAY WITHOUT REAM WEAVER !!

Regards.

I'll follow up in email.

--Eric
ewilde@adobe.com

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