Deploying Flash 11 to the Enterprise via GPO

Adobe Flash Player has to be one of the most valuable bits of software ever created, yes HTML5 is taking over for some things but all the same I don’t see Flash disappearing anytime soon.

As such its important to keep Flash updated in your Enterprise. The one pain I’m sure everyone has come across at some stage is your end users getting the prompt to update Flash themselves (see right).

So what I will show you how to accomplish in this guide is

• Obtain and Deploy a MSI for Adobe Flash Player to 32 and 64bit PCs that use Internet Explorer
• Make it so that your users do not get Flash update prompts

A few things you will need

1. A read of the Adobe Flash Enterprise Deployment Guide – http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_admin_guide.html
2. A licence to deploy Adobe Flash Player (its the only way to get at a MSI that will work) – http://www.adobe.com/products/players/flash-player-distribution.html
3. Adobe Flash Tester (it will let you know if your deployment has worked or not) – http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

As part of the setup process you will need to copy a mms.cfg file to some locations on your PCs, to make life simple a sample mms.cfg is included in the ZIP file download below along with the paths to where the files need to be copied to (all is explained in the setup guide).

  MMS Config File (131 bytes, 1,864 hits)

32bit Windows – C:\WINDOWS\System32\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg
64bit Windows – C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg

So lets get this ball rolling! For the steps on how to mash out Flash to your users follow the screen shot sequence below.