First off to get one thing clear – YES YOU CAN PUT THE ENTIRE ADOBE CS6 PACKAGE THROUGH APP-V!!

I won’t say its easy or simple and you won’t be able to put the entire master collection in a single package but by following the instructions in this series you will be able to do it.

As a little background you should be aware of the following details, there are a few links below that may help you tweak the instructions I will provide in this series of posts-

• You need a number of prerequisite applications/DLLs installed on both your clients and sequencing PCs, all of these can be deployed by good old GPO/SCCM
  • These prerequisites can be found in <Adobe Install Folder>\Adobe CS6\payloads and all the ones you need are highlighted in this image link
• You will need the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition 3.0 to prepare the Adobe software, licence keys (which you should have already) and Adobe online login
  • This should be installed on a PC other than the clients/sequencing PC
  • You only need it during the initial prep and can be uninstalled after
• To give you a decent background on the AAMEE tool you should watch the following two videos
  • Using AAMEE to Package CS6 for Enterprise Deployment
  • Client Imaging for CS6 – ultimately App-V is the same as client imaging and so this video is very useful
• You should have at least background knowledge of App-V OSD files and using scripting with them, a good read can be seen here How to run scripts in an .osd file in Microsoft App-V

Continue reading →

The next stop in this series of posts is your App-V Sequencing machine, in this case I will be running the sequencer as a virtual machine running in Hyper-V with a snapshot created to restore back to a clean machine quickly if needed.

3. Get the App-V sequencing going (but in a particular way)

Getting your Adobe software through the sequencer isn’t that much different from most other programs, the basics are you run a silent installer, include an additional folder in the Q drive (that one with the licence file/serialization file in) and also add something into the OSD file which activates Adobe each time you run it.

One thing you will need is a little bit later on is a snippet of script which I have put below to make it easy to copy/paste in.

  CS6 Serial Code (241 bytes, 3,117 hits)

Everything else you need is in the screen shots below 🙂 Continue reading →

With any luck if you have followed the previous instructions to the letter you should now have a perfectly working App-V package for any of the Adobe CS6 applications, to confirm that the licence is applying correctly you should see a command prompt window appear just before any of the Adobe applications load just as you see in the series of screen shots above.

So the question that everyone is asking – how on earth does this work?

Well basically….
The script that we included in the OSD file tells App-V to run a mini application that licences the Adobe Application every time it launches. This in turn overcomes the way that CS6 binds its self to a machines hardware ID when licenced.

So simple really! If you are having more problems with getting Adobe stuff through App-V check those prerequisites again as this is a common cause of issues!