Adobe Installation and Licensing

Hi all,

A big thank you to all who attended our discussion at Macworld. It was really fruitful for us at Adobe. We got to meet many folks face-to-face and lots of great issues arose.

One topic that came up from an attendee was the inability to find instructions for installing Font Folio. I did a few searches online and also couldn’t find good instructions. Reaching out to the font team internally today, they pointed me to these instructions:

http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/fontinstall/instructions_english.html

Hopefully this helps those who had questions about the Font Folio.

Knock on Wood

Last year I attended the MacIT section of MacWorld 2010 as a member of Adobe’s IT department as I had for the bulk of the last decade. One of my favorite sessions of all time was actually last year when folks from Adobe’s engineering spoke about the state of their installers and updates, arranged in part by THE John Welch. I thought, man, they are either brave or naive because they are going to get eaten alive! I sat right up front and may have said something like “You’ll never catch me up there on that stage.” Well they weren’t actually eaten alive and I apparently didn’t knock on wood or whatever superstitious ritualistic thing I was supposed to do because in five days I’ll be up there along with the venerable Eric Wilde, Senior Engineering Manager and my fantastic manager Carol Linburn, Group Product Manager for the Creative Suite. You are probably thinking I am just trying to butter up my boss, but isn’t it pretty obvious she doesn’t read this blog? And if that were not enough, we have a double dose of Gaurav’s! The Program Managers Gaurav Gadhia and Gaurav Sachdeva will also be there who we work closely with every day.

And of course we have slides, and stories, and demos but mainly we are going to listen and meet you, the IT admins who deploy and manage our software! We are not assembling a global team to show up in San Francisco to hear ourselves talk. No, we are there to interact and hear directly from you on how we can make your lives easier. We want to hear firsthand your challenges, pain points, and even nit picky stuff. And if that doesn’t make you happy, maybe you’ll win a prize.

Prizes!

I absolutely love prizes. I will sign up for just about anything if there is a slim chance of me winning a prize. I’ll stick around until the end of a all day event in the hopes that I might win a prize. I’ll drop my business card in any fish bowl. You know those little tickets with numbers on them? I hang onto them in my wallet for like a week afterwards, just in case there was some sort of mix-up and I’ve secretly won a prize and they forgot to call or tell me. Having said all that, it will not be a surprise that I have arranged: you guessed it…prizes! Our partners at Adobe Press/Peachpit have generously donated some awesome items including some of their new Learn By Video DVD titles. Thank you Peachpit!

Prize Fine Print: You have to be present to win. You do not have to have a ticket to win. (Unless we pass out tickets.) Maybe we should get those ticket things. Where do you get them? Do you have the sense that the Prize Fine Print is being written on the fly?

We can’t wait to see you there!

Friday 1/28 1:00-2:30pm PST
3016 Level 3 West Hall

http://www.macworldexpo.com/sessions?s=QSHOWA001NO7

Jody Rodgers | Senior Product Manager | Enterprise & Volume | Creative Suite

Just a quick note that the download section of our Prerelease servers will be unavailable for the next couple of days. We should be back up and running by end of day Monday 1/24 PST. We apologize for any inconvenience and we are sure that you will find something on the internet to distract you in the meantime.

Jody Rodgers | Senior Product Manager| Enterprise & Volume | Creative Suite

AAMEE and the Suites, phonetically this could sound a bit like “Amy and the Sweets” which would of made a great female pop group name in the early 1960s. Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition, aka AAMEE is frequently pronounced like the name Amy. I personally use the äm pronunciation (like Guam) so as not confuse our product name or team with a person. “Bundling CS updates, AAMEE can do that.” which invariably leads to: “Amy who? Why isn’t she at this meeting?”

That was quite the digression. Actually I hadn’t really even started had I? Thankfully everyone only skims my posts, right? Let’s start over:

Adobe loves suites! It’s true. There is the Creative Suite of course, and now there is the Acrobat X Suite, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, eLearning Suite, Technical Communication Suite and since I started typing this there is now the Online Marketing Suite. Really, we love suites. And it makes sense, we are a solutions company, and as awesome as our stand-alone products and services are, you really get your value when they are bundled with other products and services.

A lot of the new suites with desktop applications are actually using the same installer technology that was developed for the Creative Suite, which is what AAMEE was built to parse, configure and output into a pkg or msi. Knowing this, you might assume that you could use AAMEE with something like the Acrobat X Suite or the new Technical Communication Suite. Sadly, this is not the case. AAMEE 1.2 currently ONLY works with Creative Suite 5.0 media and CS updates. It is a technical and classic “not enough hours in the day” issue. And for you, Joe IT Admin (hey Joe!) you might want to say “But I want one Adobe configuration and packaging tool to rule them all.” And I, appreciating your Tolkien reference and the pure logic you are invoking, will make sure it is something to focus on in 2011. However, I must be honest, it isn’t going to happen right away and I recommend figuring out clever ways to deploy these other suites without the use of AAMEE and would love to hear about how you did so.

Feel free to leave use the comments to let us know how this impacts your deployment projects, time, etc. Don’t worry, I have thick skin; I use to be a Mac IT admin in a Windows-shop mind you. And Eric Wilde, let’s just say he has read ALL of the Growl-related comments.

Jody Rodgers | Product Manager| Enterprise & Volume | Creative Suite

Edited: Thank you all for your response. We’ve now reached our quota of prerelease testers. No more prerelease testers will be accepted at this time.

To those of you who responded in a comment directly here, I have your contact info and will be sending you email directly. I prefer not to publish your contact info as comments on the blog for all the world to see.

–e

Happy New Year!

We are exploring a different licensing solution in the near future and are looking for prerelease testers to help us ensure the quality of the solution exceeds earlier Adobe Creative Suite releases. If you’d like to help, please drop me a line.

Prerelease testers will receive beta versions of an upcoming Adobe Creative Suite release with a different licensing solution. The testers will be expected to install, activate and do some minimal product usage. Any problems or bugs found should be raised. Information about how to install, test and clean up systems afterwards will be sent to users who contact me showing interest.

The prerelease testing process will last two months starting on January 13^th, 2011. A Mac or Windows system without other Adobe products on it will be needed to perform the testing.

A ‘Thank You’ gift will be made available to prerelease testers.

If you’re interested, please send me email directly by January 11^th, 2011. We want to limit access to less than 100 users, so please respond quickly. Information needed in your response includes:

• Name
• Email address
• Company
• Role in corporation

Thanks for your help and feedback. My direct email address is: ewilde@adobe.com