One of the first applications that is put on the list to distribute with Intune is Acrobat Reader DC. There are several blogs that describe how to do this, however they all use the default Adobe Acrobat Reader DC Distribution executable. Only installing this executable will get you the 2015 version 2015.07.20033, which is by now (2021) extremely out dated. This article will focus on how to deploy an up to date version of Adobe.
First you still need the default Adobe Acrobat Reader DC Distribution executable, which you can download from https://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/enterprise/ . Select your required operating system, language and version. Once you have downloaded the exe you will need to extract the contents of the exe. You do this by adding the following switches after the exe. Specify your own output location.
.\AcroRdrDC1900820071_nl_NL.exe -sfx_o"C:\InstallFiles\Blog\Extract" -sfx_ne
Next you need to download the latest update from Adobe. Writing this blog this is the September 2021 update, which you can download from https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNotesDC/continuous/dccontinuoussept2021.html Download the Reader update. Make sure to choose correct bit version. In my case I need the AcroRdrDCUpd2100720091.msp file.
Place the download update in the same folder where you extracted the content of the executable. In the same folder you create two files. The first is named install.cmd and the second is called uninstall.cmd
The content of the install.cmd file is:
msiexec /i "%~dp0AcroRead.msi" ALLUSERS=1 /qn TRANSFORMS="AcroRead.mst" /Update "%~dp0AcroRdrDCUpd2100720091.msp" /norestart
Here its important that you reference the correct update file which in this case is AcroRdrDCUpd2100720091.msp.
You can use the Adobe Customization Wizard DC to further customize your Adobe installation . This will generate the mst file which is also referenced in the install.cmd file. I wont to in to detail, there are plenty of blogs which will explain this.
The contents of the uninstall.cmd file is
msiexec /x "%~dp0AcroRead.msi" /q
The content of your Adobe folder should look quite similar like this:
Test you installation by running the install.cmd and the uninstall.cmd files before continuing to the next steps.
You are now ready to put all the contents of your Adobe folder into a Win32 package and distribute it to your clients. First use the Win32 wrapper to combine all the files into a single package. If you need more information on how to do this please read this article.
- Source folder: Is the location where all the Adobe files are located
- Setup file: in this case it’s setup.exe
- Output folder: location where the intunewin file is saved
- Catalog folder: choose no
When you have your .intunewin file you can upload this to Intune and start deploying it. I won’t go in to detail but some points to take in to account:
At Program:
- Install command: install.cmd
- Uninstall command: uninstall.cmd
At Detection Rules use:
- Manually configure detection rules and use the Registry Rule type:
- Key Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{AC76BA86-7AD7-1043-7B44-AC0F074E4100}
- Value Name: DisplayVersion
- Detection method: String Comparison
- Operator: Equals
- Value: 21.007.20091 (or whatever version you install)
Hope this article gives you some more information on how to deploy an up to date version of Adobe Acrobat Reader with Intune.