Adobe Creative Cloud Packager does not support CC 2019 apps or later!

[Arthur]

😥

 

The Great Adobe Purge of ’19

 

Earlier today, the #adobe MacAdmins Slack channel was awoken from it’s afternoon/morning slumber with the following message:

 

 

Shortly afterwards, I myself, along with other Adobe customers received the same email that can be found here

 

What does it mean?

Adobe have informed its customers that certain versions of certain Adobe applications are not longer part of any license. If you continue to use these unauthorised versions, you run the risk of claims of infringement by third parties.

 

Adobe have requested that you update or remove & upgrade (depending on how far behind you are) any unauthorised versions of software you have in your fleet. They also request you delete and (if possible) recreate any deployment installers for the affected versions.

 

Finally, Adobe will now only offer the latest two releases for applications via their packaging tools and the Creative Cloud Desktop App.

 

Which applications are these?

Adobe provided the below table:

 

https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/kb/remove-unauthorized-versions.html

 

 

Why?

At this point Adobe haven’t specified why this new requirement has come about. There was an incident a few years ago where they lost a case around Dolby Labs’ copyrighted materials (link) but this doesn’t seem related.

 

It could be to do with the new Java requirements announced by Oracle earlier this year, since a number of the Adobe products have in the past utilised the local Java runtime.

 

At this point in time, who knows?

 

https://twitter.com/foigus/status/1126179890569580544

 

I annotated Adobe’s “authorized” applications table with “marketing” versions. Note “if an Adobe product is not listed in the table below, all versions continue to be authorized.”

 

[Arthur]

Remove unauthorized apps and packages

 

Adobe recommends that you download and deploy the OS-specific package to all your end-user computers:

 

• macOS
  
• Windows 64-bit
  
• Windows 32-bit
  

The above package is a specialized package that detects and removes unauthorized versions of apps from computers on which this package is deployed. Download the package for your operating system and then deploy it to the end-user devices.

 

Note: The uninstall package does not uninstall the following app versions. You are required to uninstall these app versions, manually, from end-user computers:

 

• Photoshop 13
  
• InDesign 8
  
• Premiere Pro 6
  
• After Effects 11
  
• Animate 12
  
• Audition 5
  
• Lightroom 5
  
• Prelude 1
  
• Speedgrade 6
  
• Captivate 2017
  
• Media Encoder 7 and 6
  

[DalekSec]

Is this for device or user license?

 

I'm now panicking that we are going to get an email asking us to uninstall everything lower than 2018... which we currently have 2015 across the suites... only a few staff who use adobe have 2018!

[Arthur]

Is this for device or user license?

From what I can tell, both.

[DalekSec]

From what I can tell, both.

 

.....wheres my scream pillow (not a pillow of the scream painting a pillow to scream into)

[free780]

I have my 2019 versions ready. I really don't want to deploy until the Summer. Though I may get pushed.

[Arthur]

.....where's my scream pillow (not a pillow of the scream painting a pillow to scream into)

I need one of those too after this week.

 

I have my 2019 versions ready. I really don't want to deploy until the Summer. Though I may get pushed.

I have already started deploying 2019. It's going okay so far, although teachers aren't reading the extremely simple instructions I made about how to login to the Adobe apps with their school Google accounts.

 

One thing I spent far too much time on was finding out how to silently uninstall the old CC apps. The following doesn't work (even though it should!).

 

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Creative Cloud\HDCore\Set-up.exe" --sapCode=IDSN --codexVersion=12.1.0 --productName="InDesign CC (2017)" --productPlatform=win64 --productAdobeCode={IDSN-12.1.0-64-ADBEADBEADBEADBEADBEA} --uninstall=1 --baseVersion=18.0 --deleteUserPreferences=false --showWindow=false

 

I eventually came across AdobeCCUninstaller.exe (from the CC Packager) and run this prior to installing the 2019 apps.

[free780]

It's a shame AUSST can't just update to the newest version and Adobe do some Admxs for settings. Well you can dream I guess.

[andypitts]

Really helpful thread, thanks everyone. Our license renewal is coming up soon and I'm trying to work out the best approach. I'm tempted to avoid shared device licenses altogether and go for 500 user licenses to get the cheap pricing, even though we don't have that many users. But I don't know if that would be impractical for pupils using shared devices due to the activation limit. From what I've read on this thread and in https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/using/install-apps-number-of-computers.html you can have 2 devices activated against your account at once and you can deactivate a device via the Adobe portal or by signing out on the device itself. I can see a bit of wasted time at the start of lessons if the pupils forget to sign out of Creative Cloud, but am I missing anything else? Is there another reason why user licenses wouldn't be appropriate and why shared device licenses are the way to go?