For SysAds: Deploying Adobe Reader 8 as a Managed App, Part 1

Few are brave enough to attempt to deploy Adobe Reader across an enterprise network as a managed application. Recently, I discovered why -- Adobe doesn't make this easy! The process is kind of complicated and I had to pull info from multiple sources to figure out the best way to do it. In the next two posts, I will show you how to actually deploy Adobe Reader 8 as a managed application through Active Directory.

Part 2 of this blog post is a step-by-step procedure for setting up Adobe Reader as a managed application for you to implement at your discretion. We've tested it thoroughly here and are now pushing out Reader 8 to the whole building. In this post, I'll give you the background information for the deployment.

The key obstacle in this process is that Adobe Reader has a history of installing itself as a new version without deleting previous versions off the PC, leaving multiple versions of Adobe Reader fully-installed.

Here were the conclusions from our testing:

- Installing Adobe Reader 8 automatically uninstalls versions 6 and/or 7
- Installing Adobe Reader 7 automatically uninstalls version 6
- It seems that no version of Adobe automatically uninstalls version 5
- The push will not work on any machine that doesn't have WinXP Service Pack 2

So to handle the machines that still have residual Adobe Reader 5 on them, I created a startup script (remove5.cmd) using a line of code I found on a tech blog (http://www.stealthpuppy.com/blogs/travelling/archive/2007/03/12/uninstalling-adobe-reader.aspx). The script checks for Adobe Reader 5 first, and if it exists, it does the uninstall.

This is the script:

IF EXIST "c:\Program Files\Common
Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\NT\Uninst.isu" GOTO Uninstall

GOTO End

:Uninstall

C:\WINDOWS\ISUNINST.EXE -y -x -f"C:\Program
Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\NT\Uninst.isu" -c"C:\Program Files\Common
Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\NT\Uninst.dll"

:End

This script worked on all 3 test computers that had Reader 5 installed. However, there were a couple of minor side effects:

- On two of the machines, after uninstalling Reader 5, when launching Reader 8 for the first time, Windows had to rebuild some of the application files for Reader 8 that must have been deleted by the uninstall. This process took about 10-15 minutes.

- On the other machine, no rebuild occurred, but the file association for PDF was somehow zapped by the uninstall. The user would have to know or be assisted to reassociate PDF with Adobe Reader 8.

It's up to you what order in which these two things happen:

- Adobe Reader 8 push
- Adobe Reader 5 removal startup script

Removing Reader 5 before pushing Reader 8 would eliminate the uninstall issues, but in some rare cases it could leave some clients without Adobe Reader at all (if the push fails). Your call...