Comments on: Upgrade to / install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 centrally using Active Directory group policies.

By: group policy software

group policy software — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:28:50 +0000

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By: Upgrade to / install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 centrally using Active Directory group policies. « Nadeem's Blog

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 07:09:02 +0000

[...] Upgrade to / install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 centrally using Active Directory group policies. [...]

By: Mats Hellman

Mats Hellman — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 01:18:09 +0000

Hi Tony,
as I replied above try to user PSExec to see that the computer account can access the install package.
If you run it manually you will run it with user privileges, but when the GP installation is done it will use the computer account.
psexec.exe -sid “msiexec.exe -i \\Server\Share\AdobeREader.msi”
Should do it. You can get PSExec from http://www.microsoft.com/sysinternals
Let me know if it works using PSExec.

By: Tony Wainwright

Tony Wainwright — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:26:17 +0000

Hi I have followed your clear instructions, but I can’t get it to install. If manually access \\Servername\Path\to\AcroRead.msi, it installs, but if I use Group Policy as above I get an error message:
“The installation package could not be opened. Verify that the pacjkage exists and that you can access it, or contact the vendor to verify that it is a valid Windows Installer package.” I seem to spend all my time updating Adobe and would like to automate this.

By: Upgrade to / install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 centrally using Active Directory group policies. « JesseVaughn.com

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 18:24:14 +0000

[...] Below is an article that I ran across on nixadmins.net that I found very helpful. It can be used along with my blog post that I wrote on 4-8-2001 titled “Installing the Microsoft office 2007 compatibility pack through Group Policy with Server 2003” I take no credit for the following and the original article can be read here. [...]

By: Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:16:53 +0000

Update – did what I said – it worked – 9.1 is uninstalled and 9.3 is now installed – only issue is that I get the dreaded “The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running cannot be used to view PDF files in a web browser…”.

Before this upgrade I was able to open PDFs just fine on my test machine in a browser… some posts I saw said it has to do with an old installation directory… could this be because I re-created the GPO and am not modifying the exisiting one? (the one that points to the old location so I had to recreate)

Obviously if I cant get this to work I’ll have to stick with the old version… kind of unfortunate considering how many vulnerabilities it has…

By: Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:10:05 +0000

I have only been at this company for a year, so I didnt have a say in where this package was originally.

So I was thinking over the weekend…. if I was to delete the existing 9.1 GPO (that points to the soon to be non-existant share) – recreate it, pointing it to the new location for 9.1. After this I will do what the article says with the 9.3.1 installation package as an upgrade to 9.1.

When this is done, in theory… the new GPO should uninstall 9.1 and install 9.3.1…. I will test this today in my test OU to see if I can get that working. Thanks for the reply… I am going to discuss some DFS stuff with my CIO also to choose a better location for our installation directory.

By: Mats Hellman

Mats Hellman — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:23:57 +0000

I’m not sure what’s going on there but you should be able to do an upgrade GPO, so is upgrades from 9.1 to 9.3. The upgrade install should uninstall the old version. Also check your eventlog to see why it keeps reinstalling the 9.3 version.
Also you’d be better of to put any GPO installs to an DFS share. Otherewise when you move an package from one server to another it will reinstall the package.
I’ll help if I can, old post or not.

By: Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:40:20 +0000

I know this is a pretty old post, so if you dont respond, no worries… we have just moved out application deployment folder to a new machine (decomissioned the old machine). So as it is now, I have a Reader 9.1 GPO pulling from the old source that installs on users desktops… I want to modify that to install 9.3.1 but I cant modify the old GPO because it points to a non-existant folder where Reader used to be….

So I tried to just create a new one… to install the new reader… but it seems to install EVERYTIME I reboot a machine, and Adobe Reader 9.1 shows on the desktop still (we keep the link on the desktop) but its greyed out, Reader 9.3 works… but once I reboot it re-runs the installatino over and over again…

Any suggestions?

By: Mats Hellman

Mats Hellman — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:15:18 +0000

Try to run the package with the Sysinternals tool PsExec and run the MSI package from one of your clients. Using PsExec will allow you to run msiexec with the local System account(the same is used when installing from a GPO) this way you’ll make sure the MSI works as it should. If this works then we need to take a look at the group policies. You can get PsExec from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx.
Run PsExec:

psexec.exe -sid “msiexec.exe -i \\Server\Share\AdobeREader.msi

Let me know how if it works.