Adobe Creative Cloud Upgrade

[tak10]

Hi All,

I'm attempting to upgrade all of our Mac fleet with Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 version to the latest 2017 version.

What is the best practice to upgrade all of these?

Our digital marketing side is wanting the new and the greatest so they don't care about retaining the older version of Adobe CS or CC. However, our package design team are very skeptical of all the upgrade we purpose so we may have to leave Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 version on there just to make them comfortable.

First, is it possible to have dual installs of 2014 and 2017 at the same time on the same computer being activated by the same Adobe CC - All App subscription license?

What would be the best way to manage these upgrade using JSS? I do not want users going through the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop getting the new versions since they do not have a local admin access to run the install and grabbing the package over the WAN for each user.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion you can provide for me.

[ImAMacGuy]

Originally we were disabling the user upgrade feature and handling updates via RUM. but when they rolled over to the next major version they weren't able to move major versions up. This required us to remove the old versions (not easy) and then deploy another large package out. We've now unlocked the updates on the current deployments. I guess time will tell if it works.

You get 2 active licenses per user. so technically yes, you could do that with the all sub plan.

[robertojok]

It is possible to run both versions of CC; 2014 and 2017 together. The licensing should not be a problem. however there is a chance depending on the OS that they are running that they may require an upgrade to run 2017.
We use the creative cloud packager from the aedash.adobe.com website and package Adobe CC. This will give you a build of the installer and uninstaller.
We have a preference of running only one version of CC, and normally the latest version. We run a policy with the uninstaller of the older version of CC. We then create another policy with the latest version of the CC installer which runs on condition that the older CC uninstaller pkg has been run. That way everything works quite smoothly. Also since CC 2017 is about 20G this does affect the behaviour of casper server so you will need to work out how to stagger the installation.

[mconners]

For us, we had a previous version installed, CC 2015 and we left CC 2015 in place.

We then packaged using creative cloud packager, CCP, the new version CC 2017. We then deployed CC 2017 to our Macs that required it. We updated the dock to reflect the new CC 2017 version. This summer however, we will wiping all of our labs and installing ONLY CC 2017.

So far, we have not seen any issues with both versions being installed and the faculty and students are happy to have options.

[DanJ_LRSFC]

@mconners when you installed CC 2017 using the CCP package did it update file associations so files open in the new version when double-clicked? Or do users have to open the application from the Dock first?

Thanks,
Dan Jackson (Lead ITServices Technician).
Long Road Sixth Form College
Cambridge, UK.

[mconners]

Hello @DanJ_LRSFC I haven't checked personally, but on the systems I have been putting CC 2017, we also have CC 2015 still installed, for the short term. We haven't had any negative feedback in terms of file associations. I am currently checking around with faculty about this Dan, but so far so good.

[mconners]

A follow up @DanJ_LRSFC, our lab coordinator just called me. He tells me, if a file has been updated for 2017, it will continue to open by double clicking it and typically this has always worked. Last year we ran into an issue with CC 2015. In this case, the advocated workflow was to open the application first, then target the file and things worked very smooth this way. Todd told me he found this to be the case primarily with InDesign files, not all, but some. This workflow pretty much eliminated issues with versioning.

Going back to your question, I don't have experience whether or not CCP and CC 2017 had any affect on the files to be opened. If nothing else, a user could change the associations by getting info on the file type, change to the application version of choice and choosing to change all so any additional file types open automatically in the new version.