Re: Enterprise deploy Adobe Technical Communication Suite 5

Going to answer my own question.  Its long, and im not sorry as it took me over an hour to work it out and test!

So my scenario is I am creating a disk image to deploy to my end users (over 50), I have a Volume Licence key, however installing Technical Communications Suite 5 will not install until I have logged into my adobe account which will cache my details in the image and we dont want that.

So... I have found a link to silently installing Technical Communications Suite 3 (close enough? - Yes!).

There are several things to do which with a little more work can be deployed with GPO etc...

Copy the media to somewhere, we will assume c:\TCS5

I have the following folders and files in this folder -

*deploy

*packages

*payloads

*resources

*Set-up.exe

Copy the correct language file .xml from "deploy" for me this is "Install_en_US.xml" and drop it in "c:\TCS5" for no real reason other than it makes it easier for me.

Edit this file (i used notepad++) to only include the products you want to install. i.e. Acrobat only from the TCS suite.

...

...

Create a file named "application.xml.override" in c:\TCS5 which should include the following information, you will need to enter two values yourself:

PRODUCT SERIAL NUMBER WITHOUT DASHES - This is fairly obvious and is your TCS5 product code

PAYLOAD CODE - To get this code open the setup.xml file on the media c:\TCS5\payloads\setup.xml, copy the product code between <mediaSignature> and </mediaSignature>  Example:<Configuration><Payload adobeCode="{DE60F0DE-469A-42DC-A678-978313210057}">.

The rest is pretty obvious:

Registration - Do you want end users to register?

Updates - Do you want the product to self update?

EULA - Not interested as I have already read it

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Configuration>

    <Payload adobeCode="{PAYLOAD CODE}">

        <Data key="Serial" protected="0">PRODUCT SERIAL NUMBER WITHOUT DASHES</Data>

        <Data key="Registration">Suppress</Data>

        <Data key="Updates">Suppress</Data>

        <Data key="EULADelay">-1</Data> 

    </Payload>

</Configuration>

Save this file.

Now you have you install language file, your override file and you set-up.exe file in c:\TCS5.  Lets install...  Now the guide wont tell you all the paths need to be absolute, not from where you are running the command from.

c:\TCS5\Set-up.exe --mode=silent --deploymentFile=c:\TCS5\Install_en_US.xml --action=install  --c:\TCS5\overrideFile=application.xml.override

Tada!  It should install. (the default action is install so you can omit --action=install this was also spelt wrong in the snippets I found so go careful) 

If you get issues the install logging is pretty good, they can be found here : “\Program Files(x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Installers\”  (also could be Program Files without the (x86) on your system.

If you get error 16, your file names or paths are probably wrong, error code 19? close any conflicting apps the log file will tell you whats causing the holdup.

You can uninstall with the same procedure just swap out the language install xml file to the uninstall xml file.

So there it is, if you have a better way or AAMEE 3.2 is released, drop me a PM so at least I can then slipstream the updates in...  Thats the next job...