Trials of a Network Admin

We are rolling out Adobe Creative Cloud via Enterprise licenses. Adobe provides a fairly comprehensive package builder through the enterprise admin console, including templates for most of their applications. Each includes the Creative Cloud control center, plus the relevant applications.

Deploying Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and others through Group Policy went smoothly. Of all things however, Acrobat proved to be a huge issue. What we found was that the CC control center would install properly, but Acrobat itself would simply not install. Making matters worse, the parent installer (which calls the installers for Acrobat and the control center) returned a success exit code. Lovely.

I spent way too much time searching through MSI debug logs and the native Adobe installer logs without finding anything conclusive. Making matters worse was that installing interactively worked without issue; it was only the GPO installs that failed.

I eventually found this post on the Adobe community, where poster “Bodek” referenced essentially the same issue, although he was using InTune. At this point I at least knew it wasn’t something specific to us. The community post had several replies, some of which contradict each other. There was also a reference to the Adobe Acrobat deployment configuration tool. I went down that rabbit hole without any progress.

Eventually I gave up on trying to use the parent installer and decided to directly call the MSI for Acrobat itself. But even that wasn’t simple.

Assuming you use the Adobe package builder, the main MSI for Acrobat can be found at Setup\APRO23.0\Adobe Acrobat\AcroPro.msi. This installs Acrobat DC, which is an older version of the program. After running this MSI, you need to install the latest MSP file, which at the time of this writing is AcrobatDCx64Upd2300320269.msp, found in the same directory as the msi. This will upgrade Acrobat DC to the latest version of Acrobat, which will lose the “DC” from its name.

There is one more caveat. If you already have a current version of Acrobat Reader installed, the initial DC installer will fail because it detects Reader as a “more functional product.” Therefore, you will need to uninstall Reader prior to using this method to install Acrobat.

I would love to know what is fundamentally broken with Adobe’s CC wrapper for Acrobat. My guess is there is an error in the silent install sequence, but where its occurring was beyond my time and patience to figure out. If you have any insight, please comment below.