Adobe Installation and Licensing

Okay, JAMF’s Composer has not died. I don’t even think 2007 was its release date either. That was just a cheap gripping, tabloid style sensationalist headline to get you to read this post. Truth of the matter Composer, JAMF’s packaging tool has a long life ahead of it. And it has been a valuable asset to Mac IT admins who support Adobe products since the CS3 days. In fact back in the CS3 and CS4 days it was Composer that made packaging CS a possibility on the Mac platform. JAMF stepped up and really did a great service to the community by offering this as an option and it was a good introduction for a lot of people to the great people at JAMF who do more than just create tools for packaging.

With the CS6 release Composer’s functionality as a tool for packaging the Creative Suite has though indeed come to an untimely demise. Adobe has introduced two new requirements with CS6 that impact Composer’s ability to package CS6: the validation/creation of the Adobe ID and the validation of the volume serial number. Neither one of these can be done by Composer and therefore Adobe’s own CS packaging solution Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition (AAMEE) 3.0 needs to be used. Of course there is other value in using AAMEE 3.0 including the ability to customize the package for your environment and disable the pesky new activation.

I would like to say that on hearing this change, the folks at JAMF were completely supportive about this shift and made sure to help us get the word out. They allowed us to speak at their National User Conference last year and a couple of West Coast Regional Conference events where we previewed these changes and there were no riots. I do not believe that anyone at JAMF shed a tear on hearing this news. Except maybe one JAMF instructor who I will not name, but hint: his first name is the same as a famous jazz trumpeter. I think he’ll miss teaching the packaging of CS with Composer. Time will heal.

We want to thank JAMF for publishing the tech note on how to use AAMEE 3.0 with the Casper Suite entitled “Administering Adobe Creative Suite 6 with the Casper Suite”  which they released in conjunction with AAMEE 3.0′s official release yesterday. This documentation is a great resource for anyone who is starting out using these solutions or seasoned pro.

There is great potential in using JAMF’s full set of tools to better manage your Adobe software. One example of this is the possibility of using our new Remote Update Manager tool in conjunction with their Self Service application. How cool would it be to have a button in Self Service that said Update All My CS Apps?

Thanks again to our partners at JAMF! Long live Composer!

Jody Rodgers | Sr. Product Manager | Enterprise + Volume | CS + CCM | Adobe

Last month PS Touch for the iPad hit the streets to much acclaim. The iPad is truly becoming an essential tool in the creative process. Sure, it was already a super important device in the realm of distraction and general stalling. Speaking of, have you played Angry Birds Space HD? Amazing! Seriously, those annoying pigs are in S-P-A-C-E. How can I be expected to complete my work when their smug little green pig faces are laughing at me on a moon or hiding in the middle of an asteroid field?

So how are you going to get PS Touch or the other upcoming iPad apps from Adobe (Collage & Debut) out to folks in your design and marketing departments? To your classrooms? Queue the dramatic music and shine the spotlight on those large cutout letters of MDM sitting on the stage. That is right, Mobile Device Management (MDM) will make you, the tireless/tired IT admin the hero of this new decade the way desktop deployment solutions made you the heros of the last decade. Hyperbole? Okay, maybe a little. But the workplace of 2012 is changing fast and MDM is becoming essential.

With that long intro, I am happy to announce that one of our deployment and MDM partners, JAMF Software, has published documentation Administering Adobe Photoshop Touch with the Casper Suite  which details how purchase via Apple’s Volume Purchase Program also known by its street name, VPP. Then the document details how to deploy through two methods: personal and institutional ownership models. The institutional method uses the newly released Apple Configurator tool. BTW, a shout out to Apple for birthing that tool! And last but not least, the document covers reporting; viewing redeemed VPP codes and tracking the devices that have PS Touch installed.

I want to thank the many folks at JAMF who put this document together and helped us create a clear path for our combined customers. It is so great to have a clear path outlined like this. Speaking of clear paths, I see a direct clear path to smashing down the barricades of some pigs…gotta go!

Jody Rodgers | Senior Product Manager | Enterprise + Volume | Creative Suite | Adobe Systems

I have this DVD of a fireplace. It is simply a closeup of a few logs burning slowly. It is probably one of my favorite DVDs I own. I bet I have watched it more often then the “classics” I own; Citizen Kane, Casablanca and Star Trek II Wraith of Khan. Even if I had a real fireplace I think I’d still watch it because this fire never dies down. Hot embers never pop out and burn the rug. I am convinced this is the reason why TVs were made.

And it is that time of year that I take off for Adobe’s annual shut-down and throw that DVD on, have a glass of wine or winter beer and reflect on the year. And in doing so, I just keep getting an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness. I am a thankful to so many people who have made this a great year. I want to start with our customers and especially the IT admins who bust their —you know whats— for their organizations. You NEVER get thanked enough, so I am going to say it twice: Thank you! Thank you! And as always we appreciate you for your support with our efforts and honest feedback here on this blog, in emails, and in person. We are are trying to make your lives just a little bit better for you and you deserve it!

Listen to that fire crackle in Dolby Surround! I also want to thank our deployment vendor partners! You all are golden! We share the same customers and vision and together we make it happen. Thank you! Looking forward to working with you in 2012 and expanding out into the management of Touch Apps for the tablets. I love me some uncharted territory!

Last but not least I have to thank the great people who I work with here at Adobe. I have to start with the AAMEE crew. You guys rock. Special shout outs to Sachin, Sourabh, Abhishek, Dany and Rahul. I am missing some folks, contributors of the past for sure. Tushar, Saransh and Sumita. So many people have helped out. I am forgetting others. I feel like the actor at the awards podium who forgets to thanks his wife. (Yep, someone just won an award but is sleeping on the couch tonight! ) I can’t not thank the dynamic duo of Aditya and Mansukh enough. They architect the direction of AAMEE and the other IT tools with me and never laugh (in my face at least) when I say I want to do______ by ________. And thanks to our new Program Manager Dheeraj! And of course Charat and GG. And then where would we be without the vision in the management of Nagendra and Barry? AAMEE wouldn’t even exist without those two. And there is Eric who has been such a great mentor that he now actually thinks I don’t need any more guidance and leaves me on my own to get in trouble. My awesome manager Carol who soooo doesn’t read this blog but I call her out publicly as awesome anyway, because it is true. Oh no, the music is playing. They are shooing me off the stage. Wait, what about Karl, our CS Systems Engineer who is rocking in his new role? What about Manju and all the great work she does on helping people with AUSST. Two hired beauties are escorting me off the stage now! What about the designers: Shivam and oh, Vikas. Wait I forgot my wife! My wife! I don’t want to sleep on the couch with the cat!

No really, thanks everyone! We’ve got some cool stuff coming down the pike for 2012. We’ll be showing our new command line tool that can be used to invoke the CS updater remotely at the MacIT section of Macworld/iWorld on Thursday, January 26th. Thanks John for making that happen! We’ll post more on that in early January. We’ve also got a great new version of AAMEE we are working on. Lots of good stuff. Looking forward to working with all of you who I thanked above and especially whoever I accidentally left out. Like my admin. Yikes. Sorry Karen.

May your log burn forever!

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

For those JAMF admins in the Bay Area I have a treat for you if you meet one of these criteria:

1) You didn’t attend the JAMF National User Conference last month

2) Attended the conference but had a session schedule conflict preventing you for seeing our talk

3) Attended our talk but fell asleep right when I said “Hello Minneapolis!”

You guessed it, I am bringing our talk from the National User Conference, lovingly called “Integrating Adobe’s IT Tools into Your Casper Suite Workflow” to the San Francisco JAMF User Conference next week. But don’t worry, I am not going to repeat the same presentation. I am going to make it local. So whereas I made an analogy around the CS installation process to the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo mission, I will replace the rocket metaphor with a Mission-style burrito. Specifically Papalote burritos. And if I make some random mention of beer in the talk (as I am apt to do) I will make sure that I don’t screw up and make mention of Minneapolis’ Surly Furious but instead will use Speakeasy’s Prohibition Ale as my beer stand-in of choice. See, totally different talk!

Actually, Karl Gibson, our awesome CS Enterprise Systems Engineer from Dublin, will not be in attendance. So sadly the talk will feature 85% less Irish accent action. I’ll try and fake an Irish accent during the Q&A. But I will keep that local too, making mention of the Irish Bank pub on Mark Lane which is one of my favorite pubs. Not sure how that will fit into the Q&A, but we’ll see.

December 8
Madrone Studio
Main Level Studio
3:15-4:15 PM
Integrating Adobe’s IT Tools into Your Casper Suite Workflow

To sign up or more info:

http://jamfsoftware.com/events/user-conferences/regional-user-conference-san-francisco-2011-12-08

See you there!

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

That’s right, we’ll be all over that JAMF National User Conference this week! We are not just crashing this party, we are actually a sponsor so we might have to pay for something if we break it. You’ll be able to catch myself and Karl Gibson, our Enterprise Systems Engineer, at one of three events: a BOAF, a talk, and a lively lab/feedback session. Let me give you a head’s up: they’ll be some Adobe prizes given away at all three!

Here’s the breakdown:

Tuesday Nov 8th- 6pm
Managing Creative Suite Birds Of A Feather
Zelo, located at 831 Nicollet Mall
http://www.zelomn.com/

Wednesday Nov 9th- 2:15pm
Integrating Adobe’s IT Tools into Your Casper Suite Workflow
Dowling Studio -Level 9

Wednesday Nov 9th-3:45pm
Lab Time and Feedback Session with Adobe
Cargill Classroom -Level 8

Session Schedule
http://jamfsoftware.com/events/user-conferences/national-user-conference-2011/sessions

See you at Minneapolis!

Not sure how, but I failed to announce the recent release of JAMF’s newly updated tech paper “Simplifying Adobe CS5 and CS5.5 Administration with the Casper Suite” document. This has been updated for CS 5.5 and AAMEE 2.x.:

http://jamfsoftware.com/solutions/adobe-creative-suite/

Speaking of JAMF, they are holding their National User Conference this November in Minneapolis. Spoiler Alert: I’m totally going to be there. I’ll be the one with the AAMEE shirt on. And if you see me the next day, I’ll be the one with a slightly less clean AAMEE shirt on. (I’m packing light.)

I’ve never been to Minneapolis and I am excited. Home to some cool tech places, like my friends at Code 42 and (of course) JAMF. But also home to some of my all time musical faves: The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Prince. One of my favorite design shops, Aesthetic Apparatus, is there. Plus Minneapolis has a neighborhood called Dinkytown. How awesome is that? Hope to see some of you there!

http://www.jamfsoftware.com/events/user-conferences/national-user-conference-2011/

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

Our deployment partners and friends at Absolute who make the cross-platform and now multi-device management solution Manage (formerly LANRev) will be co-hosting a webinar next week with us called “Simplify Adobe Creative Suite 5 Deployment using the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition and Absolute Manage” or SACS5DUTAAMEEAAM for short. If you have Googled SACS5DUTAAMEEAAM and have accidentally found your way to this blog post, please take off your mittens while you type or if you are my cat and are walking across my laptop keyboard again please stop it and get off the table.

Please join us on Tuesday!

Simplify Adobe Creative Suite 5 Deployment using the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition and Absolute Manage
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. PT
http://www.adobevents.com/eSeminars/Absolute/invite.html

There are also interesting webinars coming up of interest to the IT community including “Adobe Acrobat X Deployment” on March 15. You can see all the upcoming webinars and sign up at:

http://www.adobevents.com/eSeminars/2011/invite.html

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

In our continuing effort to improve IT admins’ lives (cue inspiring dramatic music) we are pleased to announce another partnership with a deployment vendor, Symantec. Symantec acquired Altiris is 2007 and through that now has a powerful set of client and server management tools know as the Symantec Management Platform. Working with Symantec has been great and the first fruits of our labor is the online documentation “Using Client Management Suite to Deploy Adobe CS5” and shows a walkthrough starting out with creating a package with Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition (aka AAMEE.) We are also working with them on making it easier to identify and manage our software through the use of ISO 19770-2 software tagging, but that is probably the subject for another blog post about what we are doing on that front. In fact, that is probably enough on that subject for a whole series of blog posts in regards to software tagging.

Thanks again to Kyle Champlin and all the folks at Symantec who are helping make life for our combined customers easier!

Two deployment vendor related posts in the same day. “Double posts! What does it all mean?” you might ask. Well it means that I have been super busy and I have neglected to post about tomorrow’s Adobe Creative Suite 5 Webinar Series which has the less than succinct title “Simplify Adobe Creative Suite 5 Deployment using the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition and the JAMF Software Casper Suite.” A title only a product manager would love, indeed. JAMF is co-sponsoring the webinar with us and it should be quite interesting.

Hopefully the marketing folks from Adobe and JAMF have already provided you with registration info but here it is again:

http://www.adobevents.com/eSeminars/2010/CasperSuite/JAMF/invite.html

Simplify Adobe Creative Suite 5 Deployment using the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition and the JAMF Software Casper Suite
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. PT, Tuesday, October 19, 2010

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

Our partnerships with deployment vendors continue in an effort to make sure that deploying the Creative Suite applications and updates is an easy and well documented process. Filewave’s deployment and file management solutions are unique as it is file-set based, and therefore doesn’t necessarily need the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition (AAMEE) to create its outputted pkg or msi files. However, AAMEE provides enterprise-specific configuration options that make it worthwhile for a Filewave admin to use AAMME. They have documented this workflow using AAMEE in their short white papers for deploying CS5 for Mac and Windows. You can get their PDFs here:

http://www.filewave.com/resources/product-brochures/

Filewave users have additional documentation on deploying CS5 and Acrobat on the Filewave Community Site.

The Filewave folks have been up to our Adobe Seattle office a couple of times recently and don’t believe us that it rains here in the fall and winter. Really, it does! They are just bringing the sunshine. Can’t fault them for that.

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