Deployment Tool Vendors
There are many deployment tools used by Adobe Creative Suite customers. Many of these products work reasonably well provided that they use the Adobe installer. To aid in push installs, CS3 and CS4 Products and Suites use executable modifiers to run in a silent workflow. This is described in detail in the following enterprise documentation: For CS4 please read Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Enterprise Manual Deployment Guide and for CS3 please read Enterprise Deployment Options for Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Editions and Components
Installation problems occur when deployment tools are used to alter or repackage the executable behavior. One example of this is installation via an application snapshot (a.k.a. – application cloning). Application snapshot refers to taking a before and after picture of a hard drive during the installation of a product. The resulting files will give you a list of everything that was placed onto the drive during installation. This does not work well because these systems copy the licensing database files that are specific to a given application. Specifically, this is an issue when you are creating snap shots of several different suite applications and install them on the same computer. Each time you place a snapshot down on a client, the same licensing files keep getting overwritten.
Some customers have been able to work around this issue on the Mac by creating a common set of shared files that make up all the applications they intend to install. This way these customers install the necessary licensing files once and then have the ability to independently install each application without overwriting any information.
Adobe does conduct basic testing with push workflows on Windows System Center Configuration Manager and Apple Remote Desktop tools. Other vendors provide deployment details specific to Adobe products on their websites. I have highlighted several vendors below that are frequently referenced by our customers along with links to relevant documentation. There are many more not referenced here. If you have a deployment tool that your organization used to successfully deploy CS3 or CS4 that is not listed here, please feel free to comment on it or email me directly at chohman@adobe.com with your thoughts on the tool.
Thanks,
Chris Hohman
Creative Suite Product Manager
Deployment tool vendors listed in alphabetical order:
Filewave
- Deploying Updates to CS3 using Filewave
- Deploying CS3 for the first time using Filewave
- Deploying CS3 with Casper Suite movie
LANDesk
LANrev
- CS Deployment Options using LANrev