I usually get quite a lot of unsolicited feedback about Adobe's installers at MacWorld or WWDC (and even better, unguarded, feedback at the Thirsty Bear around closing time) but this year without an IT Track at WWDC (grrrr) I stayed home. Since I am not down there this year I wanted to know if anyone has had a chance to try out the new Creative Suite Enterprise deployment tool? It's now named the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition and allows you to make a pkg for ARD and allows you to disable the EULA, product registration reminders, the Adobe Updater, etc. I can pass your feedback directly along to the product team. Anyone who attended the MacWorld 2010 Adobe CS Deployment and Provisioning talk/Q&A knows that they are aware of our pain as IT techs and I believe are moving in the right direction with this tool.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/enterprisedeployment.html
Jody Rodgers
Desktop Engineering, IT
Adobe Systems
by 
Wonderful! This will save me quite a bit of time.
Jody – look a couple of posts prior for “The Ten Commandments of Packaging” – I think that best sums up what we as Sysadmins would like from a Package solution from ANY vendor. Anything I type will be a rehash of that article. I believe that AAMEE is a STEP in that direction – but it’s not a Package that we as sysadmins can utilize for our deployments. At best it’s a hack – and not a terribly effective one.
The AAMEE app itself is nice, but the execution is not.
The package created by the AAMEE does not follow the Apple packaging standard in the least and as a result it is not compatible with various solutions that we use in the enterprise, such as Casper suite and InstaDMG. The Package the AAMEE creates is a payload free package…it doesn’t deploy the files like a normal apple package, rather it uses a postflight script to run the AAMEE installer to install the files. This is quite against the standard and you might as well not call it an Apple package with this functionality.
In short, the AAMEE looks pretty and the user experience is great (the steps before actually building the “package”), but at the end of the day, it falls short. We cannot use the AAMEE to package CS5 for use with pre-compiled or modular images. We cannot deploy CS5 using many deployment tools due to the nature of the Apple package it spits out. We cannot use the AAMEE in a useful manner in the enterprise until it creates STANDARD, proper apple packages. (The standard is well laid out on Apple’s Developer website and in the various texts that are put out on OS X Deployment).
PLEASE start making proper Apple Packages with the AAMEE, because until you do, you are not doing the Enterprise area much help at all.
Nate
I agree with the above, but we use Casper and I had no problem creating and pushing out CS5 Design Premium(so far), haven’t tried Master Collection yet, but after I worked out a few bugs in the JSS with the distribution point, it was pretty smooth sailing.
That being said, everything said above is completely valid, and the creation of payload free packages just to run a script to run a proprietary installer seems almost lazy to me, but that being said, this is definitely a step in the right direction especially compared to the Deployment Toolkit.
Hi Anonymous,
Adobe is working on providing mechanism to package and push out updates silently to the end users machine. This will be provided as one of the functionality of Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition.