Software Deployment

John....you picked the mother of all apps to try to get to install correctly. How are you deploying it.....AD, SMS or Altiris etc?
We may need a little bit more info before you get your answer. Are you talking about Adobe Reader? Please be version specific because there are many Adobe products.

You can start by using the Adobe Enterprise Installshield tool to customise the msi. You may also need to use ORCA to edit the vendor msi because of the Custom Actions that force the use of setup.exe cause it to fail to load into AD. Also check the Package KnowledgeBase for useful information that may help you. Start Here http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/

My sincere advice to you is to test and test and test and if you get problems....then repackage it. Capture the install with Wise or whatever packaging software you use and post here on your progress and we will help you through it. Believe me you are not alone in this.

Adobe have made their msi packages to suit the millions of users that they have worldwide......which is perfectly logical.

The "minority" of deployments like yours and a few others don't fit into that category and so you may need a bit of help. Post as much info here as you can and I'm sure you will get some results from the members here who are in that group.

Myself included.

It is Acrobat Reader 7.0. (Sorry for not specifying Reader)
I will be deployed by AD.
I wanted to stay away from msts if I could. I have been testing a lot and changing which feature I am putting it under each time. It is as if it doesn't heal itself but rather places the keys in the registry when it launchs. I remember Photoshop doing something like this where it put a file in the photoshop folder that held keys to be imported to the registry upon launching if they weren't there. Thus, the MSI never needs to heal itself when HKCU keys are missing. I will check this out but in the meantime, do you know of any way to make it heal itself?

Thank you for your reply Jim

John Summers

I too have been fighting the Adobe Acrobat Reader install to get it to repair for HKCU keys. I too wanted to switch off auto updates and the Yahoo toolbar. I used Wise Package Studio to capture the first use settings and this creates an MST, which I can apply quite happily. I had to go and set one of the registry entries as key and also associate the CurrentUser component in the MST with features that did advertising.

However!! because the MSI does not advertise the .pdf file association the repair only kicks in when Acrobat Reader is launched from the shortcut. I was not able to successfully create an advertisement for .pdf. Also, repair won't kick in if a pdf is loaded in the browser. I was not sure what I would have to do to make this work.

So currently I'm stuck with an MST that does what I want if the user uses the shortcuts. [:@]

I'm hoping someone else has had more luck. I noticed another thread talking about using an Acrobat Reader install customiser. I'll look into this.

Richard

edit 5 mins later: I looked into this and the InstallShield Tuner for Adobe Acrobat is not available for version 7 yet. Check here to see if it has been released subsequent to this post. Also noticed that Adobe won't support customisation of the installer other than through this tool - i.e. what I have done above isn't supported.

[8D]

Yo yo!

I've just completed this package, and the way I did it (in a MST) was to create a new component that was a member of the "ReaderProgramFiles" feature.

I then added all the neccessary registry values to this component.

Works fine for me.

[8D] Keep cool. [8D]