Category: Applications

About to deploy Acrobat and find there are a lot of updates to install? Good luck trying to find an updated installer higher than version XX.0. Not only is it a pain to download and run every applicable update, trying to figure out the upgrade path can be like doing super math.

To make your life a little easier when deploying Acrobat, follow these steps:

1 .Determine the upgrade path

There is an Acrobat and Reader release notes page that can help you determine the upgrade path. Click on the version numbers to determine what version is required before that update can be applied. The patching got a little easier in 10.X and 11.X with more cumulative updates, but 9.x is still a PITA. For version 9, I suggest you obtain the upgrade path from here.

2. Download the update(s)

You can download all updates from this page.

3. Modify the Acrobat setup.ini

Next, grab your xx.0 installer and extract it with an archive utility such as WinRAR.

Open setup.ini with notepad and look for the [Product] section. Start a new line here line that begins with “Patch=” and list the MSPs in order from oldest to newest separated by a semi-colon.

Here are some examples of what your Patch line would be at the time of this writing:

Acrobat 11:

Patch=”AcrobatUpd11007.msp”

Acrobat 10:

Patch=”AcrobatUpd10110.msp”

Acrobat 9:

Patch=”AcroProStdUpd910_T1T2_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd912_all_incr.msp;
AcrobatUpd913_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd920_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd930_all_incr.msp;
AcrobatUpd932_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd933_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd940_all_incr.msp;
AcrobatUpd942_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd945_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd946_all_incr.msp;
AcrobatUpd950_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd951_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd952_all_incr.msp;
AcrobatUpd953_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd955_all_incr.msp”

4. Copy in your patches

Place all of the MSPs into the root of the installation folder. This is the same folder that contains setup.ini.

5. Install

Run the Acrobat install and let it run all of the updates for you. The final version to be installed should be displayed in the installation menus. This can help you verify the latest version will be ready when the install is complete.

Optional

Use the Adobe customization wizard to generate a custom install. You can insert your license key, change the install directory, set default PDF viewers, disable the EULA, and many other useful settings. You can grab Adobe customization wizard 9 here,  X here, and XI here.

Hopefully these steps can keep you from going crazy when deploying Adobe Acrobat (especially version 9).

If you’ve ever tried to push out a silent QuickBooks installation to a computer, you probably know its not supported by Intuit. Nor can you just extract the MSI and add parameters for licensing and install directory. It’s darn near impossible to do without some sort of automation script such as AutoIT Script. I’ve tried using an MSI editor in the past and didn’t get very far because there were some missing properties.

Today I found a post on a fairly new blog called VirtualAppPack. The article has good step-by-step instructions how to create a transform file and adding the missing licensing properties. The only thing I would add to his post is not to expect an installation to complete if you add  the ‘/qb’ parameter to your MSIEXEC command. For some reason or another, it doesn’t do a full install of QuickBooks with that command. But if you use ‘/qn’, it will perform a full install.

Source: QuickBooks 2014 silent-unattended install