Patch Management and Adobe CC products

[wolftech]

Could someone walk me through how to use the new Patch Management system with Adobe CC products? Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc?

We have a ton of devices that are still running CC 2015 versions which I need to upgrade to the most recent CC versions.

The Patch Management definition for, say, Photoshop CC, implies that there's a sequential path through the versions from 16.0.0 to 19.0.1.

I know that there's a lot of discussion about the fact that there's not a direct upgrade from CC 2015 to CC 2017, but I thought if Adobe products have an official Patch Management option, that the JAMF client was aware of this and would handle the removal/reinstallation when necessary. Else, why have all of the Photoshop versions combined into a single set of definitions?

But when I try to upgrade from Photoshop v17 to v18 or v19, I'm getting errors.

Are there caveats that I need to be aware of when using JAMF Patch Management with Adobe CC?

[ThijsX]

@wolftech Hi,

See my thread, do you mean that errors?

https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/26277/patch-management-installer-error-the-package-path-specified-was-invalid

Cheers,

[wolftech]

Yes, That's the error. Though I've been wondering if its because the packages I've been testing with are FULL installers rather than UPGRADE installers.

Though my question still stands regarding whether or not the JAMF Patch Management solution will allow us to move from 2015 to 2018 when its functioning (should we truly be experiencing a bug as your thread suggests).

Cheers,
Dan

[ThijsX]

@wolftech Via Patch Management it is not possible to replace the versions, you can better do this via a regular policies in combination with some smartgroups.

There are some adobe CC uninstall scripts / you can also index the installed .pkg's in your Jamf Admin environment and then use the uninstall option via the policies, after uninstalling you can install the new software.

[wolftech]

OK, that's good to have confirmed. But then my question to JAMF would be why they're combining all of the Photoshop versions into a single Patch Policy.

It would be more appropriate to have one for each of the major versions if they're completely separate.

In addition, it would resolve another issue that I'm finding... if someone has both CC 2015 and CC 2018 versions of an Adobe application installed, the Patch Policy ignores AND misreports the earlier version. If we have a CC 2015 version still installed on a machine, this should be being reported. And if separate Patch Policies exist, it would also allow us to make sure that its running the most recent patch for that version.

[taugust04]

I was bumping into the same issue. To get around it I built a custom package in Composer that includes the Adobe installer for the application I want to patch, along with an uninstaller so it guarantees the previous version of the application is uninstalled, which both get installed into /tmp. A postinstall script kicks off the uninstaller first, then the installer. It seems to be working for me.