Adobe Installation and Licensing

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

I am happy to announce the release of the much anticipated Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition (AAMEE) 1.1. This release has the ability to turn our CS updates that come down from Adobe.com in the format of .zip files on Windows and .dmg files on Macs into MSI and PKG files for easy deployment. You can do this singularly or better yet combine them into a big bundle of updates into one MSI or PKG. Want to deploy your CS5 applications and our updates at the same time? AAMEE 1.1 can do that too. Create your own “über-package” of CS applications with their updates and deploy them at the same time with one MSI or PKG. Cool, right?

And if that weren’t enough, we have released two new deployment tools for IT admins: Adobe Provisioning Toolkit Enterprise Edition (APTEE) and Adobe Update Server Setup Tool (AUSST.) Yes, we are continuing our 5 letter acronym spree! Put the three tools names together and you almost have enough letters to play Boggle™. Both new tools are command line based and I believe you’ll find them quite helpful. The Adobe Provisioning Toolkit Enterprise Edition (APTEE) tool allows you to serialize, unserialize or reserialize installed CS applications. The Adobe Update Server Setup Tool (AUSST) allows you to configure a server on your network to become the local location for acquiring CS updates.

We’ll have blog postings that dig further into each of these tools coming soon but I wanted to let you know right away about the three tools so you can download them and their documentation.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/enterprisedeployment.html

NOTE: The Adobe Developer Connection website and new tools on them may be unavailable for a brief time in the near future for a site-based update. So…get ‘em quick! Don’t worry, they will return once the revamped site goes online. The tools should be available on LWS as well.

9/13/10 6:43 PM PST UPDATE: The new Adobe Developer Connection website is up and the new tools are once again available. Sorry for anyone who was inconvenienced during the down time.

Jody Rodgers
Product Manager, Enterprise & Volume Customers
Creative Suite

What happens when Adobe ships something as monumental in scale as CS5? Does everyone go on a long holiday? Actually not. Many folks are hard at work listening to feedback from our customers, tweaking things here and there, and fixing bugs as soon as possible. With so many applications being updated after release it is difficult for IT admins to keep track of all the updates that come out. In fact, there have already been 15 released within the CS family of applications. I am happy to announce a new website/blog that will allow for easy tracking of all Adobe Creative Suite updates. This will allow you to track all of the CS5 updates by subscribing to a RSS or Atom feed. Check it out:

http://blogs.adobe.com/csupdates/

Each blog post will indicate the name of the update, direct links to the Windows and Macintosh update files, size of the files, a description of the update, and any relevant links to Read Me documents, release notes, associated product blog entries, etc.

All CS5 updates are now cumulative and therefore only the latest updates will be listed. Older update blog entries will be deleted once a new update is available for that product. For instance, if Bridge 4.0.4 is made available we will delete the Bridge 4.0.3 post as it will no longer be relevant as the 4.0.4 update would be the only update needed to be deployed.

Making it easier to track updates via this new blog/website is just one of many steps we are taking to make updating the Creative Suite easier for IT admins. The next big thing will be the release of the 1.1 version of the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition (AAMEE) coming out in early September and will include the ability to package CS5 updates into MSIs or PKGs either individually or in the format of multiple updates. (i.e. Adobe Photoshop CS5 12.0.1 update alone or Adobe Photoshop CS5 12.0.1 update, Device Central CS5 – 3.0.1 Update, Adobe Illustrator 15.0.1 CS5 Update, etc. all in one big MSI or PKG.) But wait, there’s more! AAMEE 1.1 will also have the ability to bundle updates in a “über-package” that also includes the installable components of CS5. (i.e. Adobe Photoshop CS5 12.0 + Adobe Photoshop CS5 12.0.1 update or… all of the Master Collection + 14* updates!)

*You noticed that didn’t you? I said there were 15 updates for CS5 but then only had 14 updates in my example. I bet when you were in school you liked to find flaws in your textbooks and point them out to your teachers in the hope of extra credit. Well, Adobe InCopy CS5 7.0.2 was released and is part of the CS5 family but not part of the Master Collection. Those that already knew that, your extra credit has been recorded.

RSS Feed Link:

feed://blogs.adobe.com/csupdates/feed/

Atom Feed Link:

feed://blogs.adobe.com/csupdates/feed/atom/

Jody Rodgers
Product Manager, Enterprise & Volume Customers
Creative Suite

The Mac version of AAMEE is now Golden Master. It is available at the same link as below. The primary change between the Preview version from last month and the release version now is that there need be nobody logged into the target system in order to deploy via ARD. This particular fix is something that many, many users have requested. Our hope is that it makes AAMEE much more useful for our Mac-based customers.
Update: It seems the DevNet servers are now linking back to a the previous build. Will get this fixed ASAP and update here. –e
Update: We’re back up and good to download. –e

Adobe posted the certified version of the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition on our Developer Connection web page as well as our Licensing Web Sit today. You can find the Developer Connection downloads here:
CS5 Enterprise Deployment Toolkit (AAMEE)
Both Windows and Mac versions of freely available to all who wish to use them, including documentation. However, the MacOS version is a “Preview” version only due to a known issue with regard to deploying packages through ARD. When deploying through ARD a user is currently required to be logged in on the target system. We’re trying to fix this bug ASAP and will repost the MacOS version once the bug is fixed and a new build is certified. Current plans are to repost with the ARD fix so that no user is required to be logged in to the target system before the end of June.
Updated: It took much longer than expected to push to production; but, AAMEE should now be available on both LWS and the above URL. The above URL now points to production as well.