Admin IT needs to set Acrobat Pro not Adobe Reader as default on thousands of Windows machines

Hi Zaid,

++ Adding to the discussion,

You need to refer you Client to the Enterprise Admin Guide. And most importantly, to be aware that some of these customizations are done via Group Policy and some via the Acrobat Customization Wizard before deploying an image to all of those machines.

But even most important, I think that they need to look into the Adobe Enterprise & Teams: Administration Guide.

Specifically have them take a look in the section  "Shared Device Licensing | Deployment Guide".

It is very impirtant to clarify how are they sharing the licensing on each machine and which type of licensing: Shared Device Licensing or Named User Licensing.

I am just adding this observation to rule out if the handling of enterprise shares in an Active Domain, or setting up identity will have an impact or not during a mass deployment default configuration.

See here:

• https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/admin-guide.html/enterprise/using/sdl-deployment-guide.ug.html

That said, you didn't mentioned if the Client also have any virtualization involved in this mix like, Citrix, for example.

But nevertheless, since the Client wants to keep a parallel installation of both Reader DC and Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, the areas of interest to look into may be:

• Accepting the EULA
• Disabling Registration
• Turning off the splash page
• Disabling startup tips
• Disable Upsell
• Disabling in-product messaging
• Controlling updates

These are the areas that

usually trigger problems when you have both Reader and Acrobat installed in parallel in the same computer.

The how-to's  are described in detail in the "Basic Configuration" section of the Admin Guide.

Here's the link:

• https://adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatek/tools/AdminGuide/basicconfig.html

The Admin guides mentioned above also need as a companion the "Preference Reference for Acrobat and Adobe Reader" due to some of the tweaks that must be handled via registry hives:

• https://adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatek/tools/PrefRef/Windows/index.html