Deploying Patches for Adobe Creative Cloud using Casper Suite

[kishjayson]

We're looking at deploying Adobe Creative Cloud this year and I wanted to reach out and see what others were doing in terms of updating the desktop applications. RemoteUpdateManager seems promising, but I'm disappointed to see that there's no ability to enable or disable updates centrally as you can with something like a Apple Software Update Server.

I should mention that we will be going the Adobe Creative Cloud for Enterprise route and that a majority of our end users are not administrators, so updating through the Creative Cloud app is not an option. Looking forward to hearing everyones feedback!

[donmontalvo]

A few years ago we had a call with the Adobe team and asked for Apple SUS like commands. We were using AUSST and RUM, but needed a command line way to administer (check what's available; run whichever we wanted). Surprised nothing came out of that.

[kishjayson]

Yeah. Based on the documentation I read, we could easily create a policy to run the command and install whatever's currently available for that machine, but that doesn't really give us the ability to ensure that all systems have all applicable patches, nor report on what was installed for Internal Audit purposes.

[thoule]

So I setup an Adobe Update Server using their AUSST tool. I actually setup two instances of it, TEST and PROD. Once I'm happy with updates, I robocopy them to my PROD system. http://tmhoule.blogspot.com/2016/05/adobe-cc-local-server-and-rum.html

On the client side I use RUM. I have a client side script that runs 'RemoteUpdateManager --action=list' and then prompts the user with which updates are available. RUM then executes via launchD and a watched folder. So the user's script can run as the user, drop a file in my watched folder, which kicks off RUM. Some users are not Admins so I needed that solution.

I think this solution works very well for us.

[spalmer]

@kish.jayson RemoteUpdateManager does log everything to ~/Library/Logs (I can't remember and don't have access to a Mac with Creative Cloud to verify, but when running via Casper policy this might be in /private/var/root/Library/Logs) and since the command is verbose about what it installs this gets captured in the Policy logs. While that is not in a nice report format you can loosely audit success/failure of updates on specific computers using these logs. Also, while it is not a nice canned report of Adobe apps, you could do an basic audit of installed versions of an application by going to Computers>Search Inventory, then set Search to Applications, type Adobe*.app for the name and * for the version. This would at least allow you to get a rough idea of how may computers don't have the current version.

@donmontalvo Adobe did update RUM last November with the ability to list updates that are available, as @thoule mentioned, and download updates for install at a later time, but I don't think you can pick and choose individual updates yet. Although, I thought I remembered seeing somewhere that is on their to do list. See http://blogs.adobe.com/oobe/2015/11/yo-ho-ho-and-a-update-to-rum.html
.

[thoule]

RUM does allow you to choose individual updates.

$policy=AdobeApplicationxyz
/usr/local/bin/RemoteUpdateManager --channelIds=$policy

[donmontalvo]

@thoule sounds like JNUC2016 presentation material. :):):)

[thoule]

@donmontalvo Ha! I guess it could be- hadn't thought of that. But I wasn't planning on attending this year. Guess you should put your name in for it. ;)