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

[Zaid Al Hilali]

I'm posting this request on behalf of our client (enterprise)

Setting Acrobat Pro as default on each individual machine is documented and known to all. However, when you have thousands of machines and have both Acrobat Pro and Adobe Reader installed on most of these machines, the Admin IT would need a fast or remote tool to set Acrobat Pro as the default application.

Is there such tool or instruction to help the IT. I do remember such case few years back and have searched Adobe devnet, however, I'm not able to find it now.

Note.: Even after setting Acrobat Pro as default on each machine manually, when the Windows OS is updated, the default application would switch by itself to Adobe Reader, hence each user must go and change the default back to Acrobat Pro!

[JR Boulay]

Acrobat Reader is useless and redundant if Acrobat Pro is installed.

You just have to remove Acrobat Reader.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

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@JR Boulay wrote:

You just have to remove Acrobat Reader.

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Not an option in this case.

[ls_rbls]

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

[Zaid Al Hilali]

I will be asking the client to look at your post for better involvement.

As far as the license type is concerned, Shared Device License (SDL) is for education as far as I know, however, this client is Oil & Gas their named license is under ETLA. 

[JR Boulay]

"Not an option in this case."

Why?

(Just by curiosity)