Adobe Packager Installation imaged on PC's and Macs has suddenly stopped working saying Serial Number has expired

[Nadim_Maatook]

Hi,

Last year we created an installation package via Adobe Creative Cloud Packager an installation with our Enterprise Serial number, one package for PCs and one for Macs.

We then used this installation as part of our Images for PC's and Macs.  This weeks users have been reporting issues that Adobe is asking for a serial number, on closer inspection I notice that it is saying our Serial Number has expired.  If I try and put the serial number in again it says it is not valid.

Please can you help and advise.

[ email signature removed - see http://forums.adobe.com/docs/DOC-3731 ]

[Atul_Saini]

Moving the discussion to Deployment for Creative Cloud Team, Enterprise, & CS

[LPG-CEMEQ]

Same for mine here, I would have loved an email or something beforehand telling me that it was expiring (if it even expired for real).

[Guest]

We are receiving this error message as well. In addition, we're unable to build a license file package as well - the Adobe Creative Cloud packager tool states our serial number is expired.

[Friktion]

We are having the same issue and I really do not want to have to reset them all by hand can someone from adobe please assist us?

[Guest · Accepted solution]

First off, i want to commend Adobe Enterprise Support for responding back to me after I was on hold for over an hour and then gave up and left a voice mail.

The Adobe engineer I spoke with explained that the license number we were using was a "Grand Gesture" license that was given out to most volume license users of Adobe CS6 after Creative Cloud was released.  As an IT admin, my Adobe Licensing account was provided with one of these 18 month licenses that expired, even though my university had negotiated a Creative Cloud enterprise license with Adobe.  Unfortunately, that proper license was only issued to one specific contact person, and it was a person that probably signed the paper work for the site license but doesn't really handle the "technical matters" in terms of software licensing.  Our IT department was under the impression that the Grand Gesture license was the one we should be using for deployment.  And he we are today - with expired licenses!

Here's some additional information provided to me, in the hopes of informing others:

"Because you have experienced a time-out of your CCE licenses, this email should help you to re-license the software as quickly as possible—and without reinstalling the applications. There is a two-step process to follow that should get you up-and-running:

Identify the correct CCE serial number to use for the relicensing process. Note that some older CC serial numbers in the Licensing Web Site—the portal where your serial number can be found—are now past their active date. You will want to confirm that you are using the correct number. To do so, either look for serial numbers that DO NOT contain the additional text “EDFUL.”

The second step involves taking the new serial number, and creating an updated Adobe License file in the Adobe Creative Cloud packager and deploying it with your normal remote management tools.

So, if you're experiencing site wide expirations of your Adobe Creative Cloud licenses, I encourage you to verify that you're using the right serial number.  You might need to contact Adobe Enterprise Support and find out who the contact person is for your organization to get the correct serial number from that has the proper access on the Adobe Licensing web site.  If you have access, check all your Deploy-To-ID's on the site and see if one of the creative cloud serial numbers you have access to meets the requirements listed above.

Good luck,

-Ted

[Ric5]

Ted,

Thanks for this post. Yours was actually the best explanation I found of what happened and I quoted it and set it off to my managers.

I'm the guy who is responsible for building Adobe packages, getting things ready for deployment and handing out CC subscriptions at a community college with an ETLA license and an enrollment of just over 90,000 students at four, widely-spread campuses. We have Adobe products available in dozens of classrooms and labs and were hit particularly hard by this licensing issue. It didn't help that final exams are next week and students term projects were due this week. My cubicle was ground zero for this crisis.

Adobe's Enterprise Support team was a great help and our campus IT teams had to scramble to get our fix out, but after the initial panic, we managed to get things settled down by Wednesday.

I don't know who here, if anyone, actually knew that we had been given a new license or that an old one is expiring but I think that this should been communicated sooner, more clearly and more widely by Adobe. They could have posted a notice on the Enterprise Dashboard or contacted their sales reps to make sure that everyone they were talking to on the customer side knew this was coming. I really hope that some lessons were learned from this experience and that a change like this will be approached with more caution in the future.

A lot of very talented, dedicated and very smart IT people at this college managed to save Adobe's reputation in the eyes of hundreds (if not thousands) of users at this school. I really hope we don't have to go through this again.

Ric

[Atul_Saini]

If you are getting an error, "Serial number has expired "on launch/activation, here is the link that you can refer:  Education serial number has expired Feb. to Jun. 2015 | CC ‌

Atul_Saini

[Friktion]

Hello,

I noticed that when I follow the create license file Create license file if I run the  RemoveVolumeSerial as it states at the bottom of the document that I had to reenter all the information.  If I only run the AdobeSerialization then I do not have that issue.  I pushed the solution using Active Directory group policies on my windows computers and used Apple Remote Desktop with my macs.  Hope this saves someone some headaches.  

Have a great day.

-April

[LAC_Tech]

Boy what a fun 2 days it has been dealing with this!!!!!!

We're a higher education institution that has less than 150 licenses...so we're being forced into this VIP license model.

From what I can tell VIP licensing does not support being distributed as part of a complete OS through something like Windows Deployment Services.....or Apple NetInstall...you know, like every LAN in the world.

There appears to be no way to re-auth or re-serialize the software on a client when deployed in this fashion.

Seems I must deploy to a client post imaging....

Am I right here?

No way to send  VIP licensed product out with a win or apple image?

[LPG-CEMEQ]

Pretty sure if you license it on a per-device basis you can continue to use Creative Cloud Packager and create a .msi / pkg file with the proper license and even most likely just relicense it.

(I will know for sure tomorrow because I am in the same boat as you and will need to deploy those ASAP)

[LAC_Tech]

Concurrent licensing would solve the needs of sooooooo many enterprise customers.

Wonder why adobe hasn't implemented it?