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
- A read of the Adobe Flash Enterprise Deployment Guide – http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_admin_guide.html
- 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
- 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, 2,150 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.
Hi James
Nice article!
I’ve attempted to push out the Flash installation to users via this method but on the test machines I have had instances where Flash doesn’t work.
The version reports it is installed from ‘Programs & Feature’
Checked the rsop.msc and the software is applied
Do you find you have to remove all versions of flash prior to deploying via GPO ?
Thanks
You could probably run a script that would uninstall older versions (just find out what their MSI IDs are) and then at the end of the script install the latest version.
In theory though Flash 11.7 should overwrite any other existing versions either way though…
Hi James
Thanks for the response.
The previous versions of Flash weren’t necessarily installed via MSI packages, that in where I believe lies the problem.
Do you have a sample script with MSI ID’s ?
With some tinkering on a machine that Flash wasn’t working I managed to remove all versions then redeploy via GPO and that fixed the issue.
However need to test on a larger scale before a site wide roll out.
Might be worth seeing if you can automate this somehow – http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html
Otherwise you can find out the flash player MSI IDs by downloading them from the Adobe Flash Archive – http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html
Once you have each version load it up in Orca (details on how to get Orca are here – http://myworldofit.net/?p=1368) go to View > Summary Information and see the package code there.
After that you would need a script that looks something like this-
msiexec /x /q
e.g. Flash 11.700.169 has a package code of {F4144AFA-B859-40EA-98FF-FB460D294848} so your command would be
msiexec /x {F4144AFA-B859-40EA-98FF-FB460D294848} /q
Hope this helps!
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply you have been very helpful.
Might I also ask about disabling the Checking of updates.
I’ve copied the mms.cfg file to the location as stated above but I’ve had a user saying they are still getting prompts for updates to Flash.
Any ideas ?