Problems with Adobe Acrobat DC Customer Inventory Rules
About a year ago, we setup a couple of Custom Inventory Rules to determine our actual counts of Adobe Acrobat DC Standard and Pro. These apps use the same installers, and are identical, with the exception of a single file that gets written. The regular software inventory, just shows "Adobe Acrobat DC", however. With these rules in place, we got correct results for Acrobat Pro and Standard.
Recently, this stopped working. We had about 75 Pro installs, but now when I look, we're showing over 300, and not that many less Standards are showing. This is definitely not correct. As an example, I see multiple systems that returns results of having Acrobat Reader, Standard, and Pro all installed, but Reader is the only thing that's on there.
I think this may have just happened with our upgrade to the new version 7 KACE agent, or may have to do with the Acrobat patches that are being deployed via the K1000. The 2 Custom Inventory Rules are listed below... one for Standard, and another for Pro.
Any thoughts or assistance would be greatly appreciated.
ShellCommandTextReturn(cmd /c if exist C:\ProgramData\regid.1986-12.com.adobe\regid.1986-12.com.adobe_V7{}AcrobatESR-12-Win-GM-en_US.swidtag findstr "<swid:serial_number>9101" C:\ProgramData\regid.1986-12.com.adobe\regid.1986-12.com.adobe_V7{}AcrobatESR-12-Win-GM-en_US.swidtag > %1 && echo Adobe Acrobat DC Standard)
ShellCommandTextReturn(cmd /c if exist C:\ProgramData\regid.1986-12.com.adobe\regid.1986-12.com.adobe_V7{}AcrobatESR-12-Win-GM-en_US.swidtag findstr "<swid:serial_number>9707" C:\ProgramData\regid.1986-12.com.adobe\regid.1986-12.com.adobe_V7{}AcrobatESR-12-Win-GM-en_US.swidtag > %1 && echo Adobe Acrobat DC Professional)
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We have the same issue with our Kace 1000. Our Adobe Acrobat 2015 Standard and Pro licenses get bundled for some reason and you cannot tell how many license you really have. I currently have no solution for this. - itninja85 4 years ago
Answers (1)
Comments:
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I definitely appreciate the suggestion, and we may give that a try if we can't get things working again. We're pretty far down deployment though, so that may not be an option either.
There is definitely a KACE issue though, as our solution has been working just fine in KACE for a year now. Based off of the Custom Inventory Rules we setup, we were getting accurate inventory results back for Pro or Std, based on the SWIDtag file.
Something changed within the last few weeks that broke the way these Custom Inventory Rules are being processed. As an example, I have a client that just has Reader installed. As such, there is NO swidtag file at C:\ProgramData\regid.1986-12.com.adobe at all. Yet the inventory for this client is reporting that BOTH Std. and Pro are installed. It shouldn't report EITHER of those being installed if that file is present. - khaslbauer 7 years ago-
Your method is a plausible way but I noticed a flaw here as I looked at my own ProgramData. I noticed an old one still there from testing other Adobe products which are no longer installed. So this tells me that Adobe is careless in cleaning up.
But you did spark my memory of what I went thru in discovering these licenses because I not only had to track Std/Pro versions, I also need to track volume license and standalone purchases of the Pro. Luckily I already was tracking this way before our volume license came into the picture. I meticulously went to each of the PC's with Acrobat installed to view what license they had and set their reg with another script as stated above. I wish I had your code to help! - worzie 7 years ago-
I do know that Adobe is notorious for bad cleanup, but surprisingly, each of the clients that I have spot checked, have been clean, and only had the file pertaining to the correct version, or no file at all in the case of Reader.
We leveraged the Acrobat Customization Wizard to uninstall any prior versions of Acrobat upon installation of DC, and that seems to have actually done a pretty good job.
I also can't take credit for any of the code. We worked with a Dell Solution Architect by the name of Brandon Whitman originally, and I think he in turn worked with another member of the ITNinja community. I reached out to him on this issue, but since he's been out of town at a conference this week, he suggested I post here. If we do figure something out, i'll update accordingly.
Thank you for your feedback. I hope we don't have to go that way, but may very well leverage your advice if it comes down to it.
I hate Adobe. - khaslbauer 7 years ago
