The Case of the Passive Install: Office 2013 and Acrobat Pro 2015 (DC)

Today I spent configuring and updating our installation points for Office 2013 and Acrobat Professional 2015 a.k.a. Acrobat DC.  Office 2013 went fairly smoothly, as it usually does, configuring both a custom passive install and automatically adding Service Pack 1.  The process for it is pretty simple:

1. Run “setup.exe /admin” from a Command Line.
2. Set the options and changes you wish from the customization tool.
3. Save your MSP file to the Updates folder.
4. Download the offline installer for the latest Service Pack.
5. Run the SP installer with the “/extract” switch and unzip all of the files to the Updates folder.

Acrobat Pro however, was a little more annoying.

1. Download Adobe’s Customization Wizard.
2. Once you have that, open the AcroPro.msi from within the wizard.
3. Make your changes, generate the Transform file, and save that to the Transforms folder in the Acrobat installation directory.
4. Save the AcroPro.msi file.

The problem I kept running into, and didn’t solve but managed to work around, was that certain options from within the Customization Tool caused an error:

Unable to Submit Changes, MSI Set Value failed, Error Code = 259.

I googled high and low, the full width and breadth of the Internet, and could find no answer.  This was further complicated a bit by being an enterprise customer, so although our package said is was “Acrobat Professional DC” it was actually “Acrobat Professional 2015,” also known as the “Classic Track.”  The slight version difference made getting the proper update package more complicated than it should have been, and may be contributing to the errors with the Customization Wizard.

In the end on the PC side I was able to change or disable most everything I wanted to in the installer.  I ended up creating a simple batch file to run the Acrobat Setup program, which runs a passive install, then follow that immediately by the latest MSP update package.  Although the update runs silently, the open window of the batch file is enough to let me know the computer is still processing the update.  All of the seems to work well enough to do what I want.

On the Mac side, things were much easier for Acrobat, after a brief false start.  Adobe does offer a Customization Wizard on the Mac side, but when attempting to use it the tool wants a serial number.  As an enterprise customer, we don’t have one the way it wants it.  So that was a bit of a dead end.

However, after getting our enterprise installer and the proper update package for Acrobat Professional 2015, I simply loaded everything into AirWatch and let our EMM system handle it.  When loaded into Products on AirWatch and pushed down via a Files/Actions profile, the installer and update PKG file ran silently and flawless.  That was definitely the way to go.