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August 14, 2012
Question

Acrobat opens instead of Reader from links in MS Office

  • August 14, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 833 views

Hello,

we've installed Adobe Acrobat 9.4.5 and Adobe Reader 10.1.3 on our terminal servers (Windows server 2008 R2) and given the users separate permissions based on two security groups in AD. Everyone has access to Reader, but only some users have access to Acrobat.

Somehow Acrobat is selected as the default program for opening PDF files instead of Reader. We managed to work around this by setting some registry values with a GPO, like:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTAcroExch.Document.7shellOpenCommand]

@=CProgram Files (x86)AdobeReader 10.0ReaderAcroRd32.exe %1

But now we've discovered that if you try to open a PDF with a hyperlink in any Microsoft Office products, it'll try to open it in Acrobat again. This causes trouble for the users that don't have access to Acrobat and the session freezes for a while before it opens up in Reader at last.

So my question is, how can I make Adobe Reader the default PDF program for everyone and everywhere?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

EnterpriseHelp
Inspiring
August 14, 2012

The default PDF handler needs to be set at install time as described in the admin guide and/or Wizard Help. Setting it post-install is a hack.

Ben