Hi Waltpenner and others, yes it can be very confusing and writing script after script got me even more confused.
Now, the story continues, after 6+ hours on the phone with Adobe Support...
- When you install Adobe Acrobat XI it asks you to install the C++ Redistributable package and this is where the msi will STOP INSTALLING. even though the MSI says "complete"
- Now you think to yourself, OK, I'll write a script to install this msi package no problems, solved.
- Nope, the msi for Acrobat Pro XI will Still Halt even if you write this into the script along with halt no err or something similar in your code.
- So what do you do?
- When you create your msi in Cloud Packager, even though this feels completely against your better judgement tick the box under conflicting Process entitled "Ignore Conflicts and Continue installations" This will (finally) allow you to run the msi. Please see the wonderful deployment script above, which you may still need to edit to your needs (I did) - which I post once it's working perfectly.
- You could then install the C++ redist from Microsoft at a later date ----> On that note however (thanks Microsoft for this gem) the Visual C++ redist is an msi for download, but it's actually a zip file calling an exe inside it. I suggest using the App Deploy Repackager to help you change registry entries if you need to install this, but choose your favourite tool (and no I'm not talking about that work colleague you don't like
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- Note: You will need to install this for certain features of Acro Pro XI to function, most of which relates to sever functions of Acrobat. I will post the exact reasons when I find them. Under pressure to get this deployed, I have not deployed this pckage as yet. Also, I'm unsure how Visual C++ will affect other major apps across my enterprise just yet.
Things to still consider
- Acrobat still installs twice in the program directory (1.7GB nd 1.8GB respectively)
- As all of the other CC packages are quite easy to install, Adobe needs to provide better service to it's enterprise customers by creating a proper version of Acrobat and Lightroom which is Acrobat CC and Lightroom CC, not version numbers tacked onto their new Cloud Service.
- As for the above point I would still recommend creating the smallest msi packages you can, as large msi's that install a number of Apps (eg all of the web/image editing apps) take forever and quite often exhibit install errors
- The amount of time I've spent on this is ridiculous, and we've had to package everything from Office to Autocad.
- The amount of bandwidth I've chewed up is excessive, with package re-creation (download) of all the products probably about 100GB - however the ability to edit these packages with updates with the CCP is a good step forward.
- Using the CCP through a proxy is horrendous, and complicated with the amount of exception through the servers you have to prvide (even then it rarely works).
- The MSI packager still needs quite alot of work. As Petri states why he had to write a script like this when Adobe could have done the same thing is beyond him.
- Adobe needs to trawl it's forum posts and take out the many false leads and dead ends provided by it's experts.
When I Think of anything else, or wite more scipts I'll let you all know.
Cheers,