I’ve been retired from blogging for almost six months, which in Internet Years is like six millennia. This whole post should be simply a Vine clip, right? You probably missed my retirement party when I retired from blogging. The guys all chipped in on a gold-toned watch. The inscription on the back “Did you notice the green squiggly lines?” was particularly touching.

What could draw me out of retirement? The fame? The money? Well seeing how I saw neither of those while I was blogging I’d have to say no. It was actually a blog post that my esteemed and ridiculously talented co-worker Terry White wrote entitled “5 Myths About Adobe Creative Cloud” a couple of months ago.

It is a good post, and features a photo of Nessie, the famed cryptid from Scotland. Which instantly makes me think of the show “In Search Of” which I loved as I child and honestly, creeped me out as well. Myths about Bigfoot or UFOs are still cool in my book, but myths about products…not so much. I always considered myself more Mulder than Scully but here I am dispelling myths, shining my over-powered flashlight on the the dark shadows of misinformation and confusion that IT have about the Creative Cloud.

1) Creative Cloud is virtualized or streamed

Wait, isn’t that pretty much the same as Terry’s #1 myth “I don’t want to run my Applications in a web browser!”??? Yes, but mine is phrased slightly differently, which in the world of blogging is legit. Seriously though, this gets brought up continually and it is worth mentioning again that the Creative Cloud is a new method of distributing our creative desktop applications but they are still applications that are installed and run the old school way. They still take up GBs of your hard drive. Oh wait, I wasn’t supposed to highlight that fact. Shrug. But you get it. Our beefy products like Photoshop work best installed on systems with lots of RAM and a modern GPU. Now, it has to be stated that virtualization technology is rapidly evolving and advancements like virtualization of the GPU is just plain awesome. But, the Creative Cloud at present remains a way to download the software from the Cloud, not run the applications in a browser or thin client.

2) Creative Cloud can’t be deployed

What? After spending the last 3-4 years trying to do right by the IT community by making packaging tools like AAMEE, licensing tools like APTEE, and updating solutions like AUSST and RUM do you really think we’d roll out a major offering and forget about the IT deployment infrastructure your organization has invested in? Seriously?

Now let me explain, briefly, that we have three different types of the Creative Cloud and I believe some of the misconceptions about deployment have been rooted in the lack of clarity about the different types of the Creative Cloud. If you are an individual, a freelance designer or one-person video production shop, then you can buy the Creative Cloud for individuals. They are admins on their systems. They are their own IT, Procurement, Accounting, etc. No deployment needed, obviously.

Now the next offering is tailored for small businesses or small groups within a large organization, they might want to look at Creative Cloud for teams. An ideal number of folks would be like 5 to 30. Let’s say it is a small game developer that buys 25 seats of Creative Cloud for teams, and they have an IT guy who has setup a deployment solution to manage their Macs. The IT admin would log into the Creative Cloud for teams admin portal on the Creative Cloud website and they see an interface for inviting Team members via email. They’ll also see a Deployment section and they’ll be able to download the new Creative Cloud Packager 1.0. This new tool allows the IT admin to download the Creative Cloud desktop applications and their updates and package them. So unlike AAMEE, it doesn’t point to locally downloaded media like the ginormous Master Collection but rather the IT admin can cherry pick applications they want to download to package. See, better! I’d like to take credit for this but I am no longer over the IT tools, so hats off to Karl Gibson and the crew formally known as the “AAMEE crew!”

A 1.1 version of the Creative Cloud Packager is due shortly after the new set of Creative Cloud applications are released next month. The 1.1 version will work for both Creative Cloud for teams and for Creative Cloud for enterprise. The Creative Cloud for enterprise is the third type of the Creative Cloud and is meant for larger institutions who need higher levels of control.

3) Organizations can’t control the frequent updates

One of the coolest parts of the Creative Cloud is that we are no longer waiting for annual or 18 month cycles to get new functionality from the products. If the engineers have a cool new feature in Illustrator they release it to the Creative Cloud members as soon as it has gone through the regular QE process. That team doesn’t have to wait for a year to have it be a part of a new boxed copy of the Creative Suite or wait for a marketing event. Nope, bam! Into the hands of their users straight away. Sounds great for individuals or people in design studios with mohawks right? But what about my enterprise production environment? What about my strict policy of evaluating all updates before they are released? Nothing changes. The updates are available via the Creative Cloud Packager and can be packaged at the IT admin’s discretion. Same level of control.

4) Adobe IDs aren’t for us

The way the Creative Cloud for individuals and teams versions work is that the applications, services and storage use a licensing/authentication process that involves an Adobe ID. For Creative Cloud for teams we have an admin portal that allows the IT admin or production manager the ability to send out email invites and those users have to create Adobe IDs in order to sign into the Creative Cloud (i.e. the applications or at creative.adobe.com.) The end users who are using Creative Cloud for teams have to obviously be online to authenticate with their Adobe IDs. Now that is the Creative Cloud for teams which stated above is ideal for small organizations.

Frankly, this doesn’t scale for large organizations for hundreds or thousands of users. It doesn’t work for organizations like video production places with offline workstations. Larger organizations want to use their own identity systems (like Active Directory or LDAP) and do not want to use Adobe IDs to identify their organization’s users who have access to the Creative Cloud. Of course. This is why the Creative Cloud for enterprise offering has this in mind. Presently if you purchase Creative Cloud for enterprise then the IT admin has the same flexibly to package and deploy the creative desktop applications without use of Adobe IDs. What? Yep. How are the applications licensed? A contract-defined expiring serial number. A serial number? Boring, right? Old school. Status quo. Status Quo.

Now there are a lot of great aspects of the Creative Cloud that go beyond just the core applications. It is essential that we provide this functionality to our enterprise customers. We are working on the ability for your organization to control login into the Creative Cloud using your authentication infrastructure by using Single Sign-On authentication via SAML 2.0. This will allow for the use of the cloud functionality including storage and services. I’ll come back and do an entire blog that outlines our strategy around supporting SSO and will separately write an entry explaining all the advantages you and your users will have once they are signing into the Creative Cloud for enterprise. Some really cool stuff. Are we aware that not every enterprise customer is ready to support SSO or use a different authentication method? Yes. Will we support other methods of authentication down the road? Yes. But we are presently working on Single Sign-On authentication via SAML 2.0 as a foundation of our authentication strategy.

5) Cloud storage isn’t for us, so neither is Creative Cloud

I have saved one of the most contentious myths for the end. First, there are always concerns from IT about files stored in the cloud and rightfully so. The “Adobe Creative Cloud Security FAQ for IT” doc covers a good portion of questions you or your organization might have about our cloud storage aspect of the Creative Cloud.

And for every CIO, CTO, or IT admin who tells me they are shrinking their data center and using more cloud services there is always a set of IT folks who tell me the opposite: My user’s data will never be in the cloud. To that I say: okay. No fight here. Seriously. You can’t turn off the cloud storage component for the Creative Cloud for teams, but there are ways of course for IT to control traffic and block ports. These are documented in the “Adobe Creative Cloud Network Endpoints”  and “Controlling Access to Adobe Creative Cloud Services” docs.

And restricting storage access is certainly an option for the Creative Cloud for enterprise. Presently there is no identity login component for the Creative Cloud for enterprise so hence no accessibility to the cloud storage. When your organization begins to have access to the Creative Cloud via SSO then the IT admin will have access to an admin panel which will include granular levels of control over who has access to what applications, services and storage. Want to turn off storage? Okay. Want to give more storage to the marketing group. Okay. High levels of control for IT, is at the heart of my personal vision of the Creative Cloud for enterprise.

We’ll be more than happy to squash some more myths and answer questions in the comments. Or we can discuss who would win in a fight between Chupacabra or Moth Man. Your call.

Jody Rodgers | Sr. Product Manager | Creative Cloud for enterprise

Great news, Creative Cloud Packager 1.3 is now live.

We are genuinely excited about this release. Not that CCP 1.2 was not exciting, actually who am I kidding it was important in that it had some bug fixes but that’s not exciting is it ? Though maybe I am being presumptuous and their are people out there who just love a good bug fix. CCP 1.3 on the other hand brings some pretty exciting features and just to keep those aforementioned people happy we also have some bug fixes.

Here are the new features in CCP 1.3

• Support for archived versions of Products
• Support for Native application Installers (Edge Code, Edge Reflow, Scout, Gaming SDK)
• Support for Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) files
• RUM support for Feature Bearing updates
• New Shortcut locations
• New IT Tools Un-installer
• Build information in Product UI

Let’s start with

Support for archived versions: The Creative Cloud gives you access to the latest and greatest Adobe products but also access to previous or archived versions of products which is a very important aspect to many peoples workflows. CCP 1.3 now allows you to package the latest and greatest but also archived versions of applications beginning with CS6 era applications. They can be packaged together or separately depending on what your requirement is.

Support for Native application installers: In the past you would need to download separately from Adobe’s licensing website any applications that were native installers. In this release those applications are now downloaded directly from CCP.

Support for Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) files: CCP will now honor PAC files that are used to provide proxy information.

RUM support for Feature Bearing Updates: This was a big one, you can now install FB updates by invoking RUM or by going to the “Help” menu of the product itself, this was not previously possible for Creative Cloud Enterprise customers.

As promised there are some important bug fixes in this release. Some customers where having issues with imaging when non Creative Cloud products where included in the image, this should now be fixed. Customers using AUSST where experiencing an intermittent issue whereby downloads where timing out. We have now updated the version of AUSST carried in the CCP 1.3 download and also on Devnet to resolve these issues.

What do you need to do to get this amazing new release you ask ? Why just re-launch CCP and you will be prompted to self update.

For more information on this release please visit the Creative Cloud Packager help page

Finally a special thank you to all the participants who helped test out the Pre Release version. Your input as always is incredibly valuable.

Cheers

Karl Gibson | Product Manager | Enterprise IT Tools

Hi All,

It has been a little while since my last post. That does not mean that I have embraced the dream to retire to some remote island off Fiji or at least spend 6 months out of the year there. A place with no internet connectivity, and just a small shop to get supplies from and make a long distance phone call across a crackled line once a month to touch base with the outside world. I guess this would also mean I would have no need for my pedometer, smart watch, tech glasses, Bluetooth headphones, smart thermostat, smart smoke detector and most distressingly my smart crockpot. On reflection, it seems as though I have invested way too much in technology to ever lead a life of solitude and so with that settled, let’s get on to business.

Some of you will already have noticed that Creative Cloud Packager 1.5 is live and available to download. This release includes several under the hood changes as well as customer facing features.

• Creative Cloud Packager now supports Value Incentive Program (VIP) for education customers.

• You can now deploy specific version updates, rather than just the latest updates.

-If a newer update is present in CCP and you wish to deploy and older version of it from some physical media you may do so via the offline media workflow.

• Creative Cloud Packager also supports packaging non-Creative Cloud apps.

-Creative Cloud Packager will allow customers also entitled to Premiere Elements for Mac, Photoshop Elements for Mac and Technical Communication Suite to package and deploy using Creative Cloud Packager. This is accomplished when you enter a license key for the relevant product in to the packager and we will fetch the product and present it for packaging.

• Adobe Update Server Setup Tool (AUSST) now supports secure connections (https).

-The product update binaries, however, are still transferred over http.

• New customer segment Identification screen (as above)

• Trial License workflow for enterprise renamed to Named License (can still be used for trial)

If you have not updated yet then all you need to do is launch CCP and you will be prompted to update.

Cheers

Karl Gibson | Product Manager | Enterprise IT Tools

Hi All,

Lately posts have been a little thin. This past year the team has been heads down, focused on a new initiative that I’m excited to share with you.

History

As many may know, Adobe has used its own installer technology called RIBS for the past several years. RIBS was created to bind the individual products together when we first released Creative Suite and the technology is still used in todays Creative Cloud products.

We realize RIBS is not ideal for enterprise workflows and in order to deploy the software you are required to use either Creative Cloud Packager or it’s predecessor AAMEE. While those products offer features beyond their core competency of converting from RIBS to native installer such as the ability to specify update behaviour, pre-serialise, create update packages and license files, it is still an additional step IT need to take.  Also in order to use CCP, you need both Mac and a Windows systems clean of other Adobe software and network connectivity, requiring IT to open firewall ports.

The Change

Now, Adobe will pre-populate packages for Creative Cloud for enterprise customers. When a user logs into the Adobe Enterprise Dashboard, they will go through the following process

Adobe entitlements are detected and packages will be created automatically,

When you select packages you can filter by “created automatically”

These Pre-Created packages will leverage the default and most common settings. Users can change certain settings such as language, update behaviour and for Windows, bit architecture,

Once satisfied with the packages and settings select “build”

The system will start building and downloading packages

It’s as simple as that !

Users can also, delete packages and can filter by package creator.

Future

The question I am sure that will arise is, why doesn’t Adobe just use native installers  ?. It is a very valid question. As i mentioned RIBS allows you to deploy multiple products in the same binary but other advantages are limited to Adobe itself. This is changing and in the not so distant future I will go in to more detail about the changes that are being made to the RIBS installers to increase the benefit to end users.

The Team

Finally (I know long post) I was in Noida nearly two years ago when we sat down as a team and discussed this new direction. We discussed the pain points and how we could remove the packaging step for IT admins. Since then the team have worked tirelessly to make this a reality. We have many features still to implement to get this where we want but as a 2.0 release this is a huge step and I want to publicly thank each member of the team who worked crazy hours and put up with my stress levels.

Now the real question is, if you have a big launch at 6am is it too early for a celebration beer ?

Video Walkthrough

Cheers

Karl Gibson | Product Manager | Enterprise IT Tools

Hi All,

I have my feet firmly back on Irish soil after a few great days at MacSysAdmin in Gothenburg. I must say it is a very unique and engaging conference. The level of knowledge on display is quite impressive and that very much extended to working with Adobe products. After my presentation in which I requested for IT admins to continue to engage and work with us there was several very engaging discussions which will hopefully lead to new functionality and fixes.

While I was presenting and playing pool in Gothenburg the team was hard at work and we released CCP 1.9.2 yesterday. The main focus of this release was on proxy support. Previously while Pac was supported there was some issues and we also did not support WPAD. Both of which are now fully supported and from our preliminary tests with customers this build looks to have solved all of the issues customers were experiencing with these network topologies.

CCP 1.9.2 now also includes the option of Auto-updating. This can be set from the preference menu and when there is a new update of CCP you will also see a screen requesting your preference.

Finally with the introduction of El-Capitan we were required to change the location of RUM on the client system to conform with Apples new guidelines. As such, when we deploy RUM now from a CCP package it will be located in “/usr/local/bin”

Cheers

Karl Gibson | Product Manager | Enterprise IT Tools