Adobe Package Creator

Come now, version 2 of the packager made it possible for me to have a CS5.5 pack, that even rolled in the current updates available, and Actobat Pro X, in 10 minutes. This compared to CS3 and almost three weeks screwing around with it, mostly Actobat crap. It is for sure an improvement. Still plenty of room to improve.

Craig E

Is it really working that well?

Pre release and version 1 had me running for the hills with my tail between my legs.

Nick Caro Senior Desktop Support Administrator

I just packaged CS5.5 STD and Prem for Mac and Windows and it was
awesome.

Patrick Bachuwa
Desktop Engineering Applications Sears Holdings Corporation
Michigan Campus
3000 W. 14 Mile Road
Royal Oak, MI 48073-1717
Phone: 248 637-0350

2 questions:

Can you install 5.5 ontop of 5 to upgrade it?

Can you install say production premium ontop of design standard of someone gets a license upgrade?

Regards,

Ben.

AAMEE

Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition

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

ben janowski
Senior Macintosh Support Technician
Kohl's Mac Support Team
262.703.1396 | benjamin.janowski at kohls.com

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

AAMEE

Regards,

Ben.

Or Adobe Always Makes Everything Effing-ridiculous

:)
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

It works well.

I spent an hour or two going through the documentation, creating my CS 5.5
deployment package and testing. Worked the first time as advertised. 5.5
deploys and is ready without me doing additional management.

Compare that to the hours I've spent with earlier versions trying to
suppress registration dialogs, update dialogs and suppress Acrobat
self-heal headaches. My experience has been bliss.

AAMEE isn't perfect. Acrobat updates have to be handled in a special way
and Help still wants Adobe Air, which you must suppress in AAMEE if you're
using certain proxies. But those are application problems not AAMEE
problems. The AAMEE group is trying to offer solutions to the various
problems caused by a lack of development continuity within Adobe.

--

William Smith
Technical Analyst
Merrill Communications LLC
(651) 632-1492

Hi,

That is my question as well. I sometimes need to install After Effects for a freelancer and then remove it after a few days. We own all the suites, but our basic build is Design Premium. I can make a Master Collection as well, but just want to roll out After Effects.

Any ideas? Looking forward to trying AAMEE.

Cheers

Michael

Michael, On Jul 15, 2011, at 12:02 AM, Michael Curtis wrote:

I had this dream and AAMEE will do just that - sort of. You can create a pkg that only includes After Effects and not any other apps. You can also install and serialize it without worrying about licensing for one breaking the other. HOWEVER, there are some issues that I found. Even though you will specify just After effects for the install, there will still be quite a few other bits of what adobe calls "protected content" that will install. This creates a messy install as there will be app folders (in /Applications) and files that get created, but in most cases are just empty folders or partial app containers. It ends up causing confusion for end-users as they think the partial app is intended to be there. I found myself scripting the removal of the unwanted adobe folders. Be careful there though, since if a person may have installed one of those apps as well.

What it eventually boiled down to, is that my dream of packaging a number of individual applications was not possible to do well given some of the issues of AAMEE. Essentially having a number of ad-hoc installers became a nightmare. I gave up and created larger groups of apps and require that the original group is removed before the new group is installed.

This should be possible.

Although I haven't tested it recently the way the packager works you give it a source installer, let's say the Master Collection, and then select the products within it you want to create a package of. This could be just After Effects.

When we serialize our packages we've always used our Master Collection key (some have said that's a no no by Adobe). This way when the installers updated the licensing database it wouldn't clobber anything (it use to before the tool), it would just be replacing it with the same key and everything still worked. However, I would have better confidence now that if I created a Design Premium pack with the proper key and a Production Premium pack with just After Effects in it with that key, that the package the AAMEE makes will update the license file properly and both continue to work.

The packager also builds uninstaller PKG files you can just dump into the JSS and use. It does NOT clean EVERYTHING out, but does get the App and some other things.

I have not tested the upgrade scenario yet. More than likely what it will do is install the newer version of apps it has alongside of it. It's not really an upgrade more of a new version over again. Unless you wanted to get rid of all the dead weight from an older version you can just script the removal of the Application folder for a specific app. JAMF at one time also provided their own uninstall script that targeted all the files for a particular suite to completely delete it. I'm sure they're still around somewhere.

Hope that helps.

Craig E

I haven't tested but I'm going to say "unlikely". Instead, they'll install
On 7/14/11 2:30 PM, "Ben Toms" <bentoms at btopenworld.com> wrote:
side-by-side just like installing CS5 installs side-by-side with CS4 and
doesn't upgrade an existing CS4 installation. 5.5 is an upgrade not an
update.

CS 5.5 installs application folders with different names -- "Adobe
Photoshop CS 5.1" for example. (Don't get me started on how silly this is.)

--

William Smith
Technical Analyst
Merrill Communications LLC
(651) 632-1492

Hi Sean,

We tested this successfully, but we ended up pushing with the serial since our clients have volume licensing. We tested with two different volume licenses to be sure, no issues.

What we didn't test is pushing serial numbers for different regions (en_US vs en_UK). Not sure what would happen...I would hope AAMEE creates a whole-ehchalada PKG that would work with any serial, but not sure.

Thanks,
Don

The alternative is to install Master Collection on every machine and then use the provisioning toolkit to license appropriately.

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/creativesuite/pdfs/AdobeProvisioningToolkitEnterpriseEditionTechNote.pdf

One Adobe package and no need to remove/install applications, just a longer time to wait to install initially. Maybe someone out there is already doing this? All Docs and downloads are available from:

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

Sean