Legal
The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Search
January 25, 2007
Enterprise Deployment of the Adobe Acrobat 8 Family
Adobe Acrobat 8 poses new opportunities—and some new challenges—for the IT staff of large organizations which need to deploy Acrobat to many users.
Adobe offers a new, completely re-written installation tool called the Adobe Customization Wizard for Acrobat 8.0. This tool allows you to create a Windows Installer Transform file (.MST) to modify Microsoft Installer files (.MSI).
With Acrobat 8, Adobe introduced the Adobe License Manager (ALM), a system for tracking and managing Acrobat licenses. ALM is essentially a license manager which tracks the licenses in use in your organization.
This blog entry is not meant to be comprehensive, but seeks to address the most common questions we receive from customers.
- How do I disable the Adobe License Manager?
- How do I customize the installation of Adobe Acrobat?
I’ve included several links throughout this article which offer a deeper dive.
For the record, I’m not a deployment expert, so I cannot respond to technical questions about this topic.
Read on to learn more about common deployment questions…
Adobe License Manager (ALM)
When you do deploy Acrobat 8.0, you will need to make some decisions regarding the new Adobe License Manager (ALM).
While use of ALM is not particularly difficult, some customers have told us they wish to avoid a “Version 1.0 Product”.
Adobe is offering a transition period during which customers may opt out of e-licensing.
To opt out for new orders:
- Log into the Adobe Licensing Website with your user name and password.
- Choose the task Setup e-licenses for new orders.
- Follow the prompts until you are offered the choice of managing your licenses electronically.
- Choose Disable e-licensing and ALM is switched off.
- From the following page, download the customized client setup file and prepare your installation package in accordance with the instructions provided at this web page.
In this way, you will delay having to deal with ALM for a year to give you more time to prepare.
How do I get to my Adobe licenses and software? |
More information about ALM can be found here on the Adobe website.
If you encounter any set-up issues with ALM, send a message to the ALM Hoteline – ALMhotline@adobe.com.
Enterprise deployment of 8.0 using the Adobe Customization Wizard
The Adobe Customization Wizard for Acrobat 8.0 is a free tool to customize your deployment of Acrobat 8.0.
You might also want to review the Adobe Customization Wizard Datasheet and a more detailed technical note.
The Adobe Customization Wizard for Acrobat 8.0 to creates Microsoft Transform (MST) files to modify MSI files. Note that Adobe doesn't support manual modification of MSI files.
The Adobe Customization Wizard 8.x is compatible with the following Acrobat 8.x products:
- Adobe Acrobat 3D Version 8
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Elements (when available)
- Adobe Reader 8
To build your own MSI customized for your firm, take the following steps:
- Install the Adobe Customization Wizard 8 and build a transform for your environment. Depending on your application to push out applications/utilities, you may want to build a package that copies the following files:
- Abcpy.ini
- AcroRead.msi
- AcroRead.mst (the transform you create with the wizard)
- Data1.cab
- Setup.exe
- setup.ini
The wizard will generate a setup.ini file along with the transform file. - Run "setup.exe" and which will run the transform you built.
Comments