Autopkg and Adobe Creative Cloud and updates?

[John Lockwood]

Currently for our smallish number of Adobe Creative Cloud users - and at previous companies I merely invite them in the Adobe Admin Portal and assign licenses to them.

The users get an email via which they login and can then download and install the Adobe software. This has been working fine.

The users also currently have local admin privileges allowing them to run installers and the Adobe software itself handles doing updates.

Having looked at the options available for Adobe and utilising Autopkg and Munki it seems that you can only build Adobe installer pkgs, download them and add them effectively manually to your Munki Repo. This would allow the use of Managed Software Centre as a single location users can go to for installing software - including Adobe and should mean that if/when we remove these users admin privileges they can still install it.

However as far as I can see it does not make it possible for Autopkg to automatically find and download and add newer versions of Adobe software and you would have to use Adobe's built-in update mechanism.

This is not necessarily a disaster and certainly not the fault of AutoPkg, Munki or Greg Neagle or the many people who have contributed towards recipes etc.

I am just wanting to confirm this understanding is correct, that there is no way to use AutoPkg and Munki to manage Adobe updates and to castigate Adobe for unnecessarily inventing an admin hostile software distribution method when even Microsoft with Office365 have not needed to.

[Graham Pugh]

There is no way to handle Adobe CC updates via AutoPkg. However, it's easy to use Adobe Remote Update Manager and you could use Munki to run the RUM check periodically. This page explains how it works: https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/using/using-remote-update-manager.html

The command on that page is wrong though - it should be 

/usr/local/bin/RemoteUpdateManager

When downloading the Adobe installers from the CC admin console, just make sure you enable RUM in the options. Then you can just run the above command.

Cheers

Graham

[Mike Solin]

As a university, we have two Adobe licenses available to us - Named User Licensing (NUL) and Shared Device Licensing (SDL). For NUL users, we deploy the Creative Cloud Desktop app (CCDA), and let them install whatever apps they need. When building a NUL package in Adobe's admin console, you can specify if you want non-admins to be able to install apps through CCDA.

For SDL users, we make individual packages, import them into Munki, and deploy as managed_installs or optional_installs, depending on where and how the computer will be used.

I really miss the days where you could have AutoPkg recipes drive the Create Cloud Packager app, but Adobe's switch to exclusively building deployment packages through their web console ended that. That said, take a look at these AutoPkg recipes from dataJAR:

https://github.com/autopkg/dataJAR-recipes/tree/master/Adobe%20Admin%20Console%20Packages

Ben Toms did a fantastic job putting these together, and they saved me hours, probably even days, in labor. The idea is that you still build your packages in Adobe's admin console, but you feed them through the overrides you create from these recipes. They'll handle importing each installer into Munki, setting the installs arrays, other pkginfo keys, etc.

I assume you can use the recipes with NUL packages, but I haven't tried it. Worth a shot! We've discussed using RUM here, but my preference would be to build newer installers for the apps and deploy those instead (especially since those recipes make it a much simpler process).

Mike

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https://mikesolin.com

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[Ben Toms]

Thanks, Mike <3

Yes NUL work, we use NUL and license with SDL post as needed (we're an MSP).

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Regards,

Ben