Deploying Adobe Reader
Every quarter, adobe get round to releasing their latest security updates for Adobe Reader. To roll them out across the network, rather than going to each individual workstation, and logging in/running as an admin we deploy as much as we can with msi files. However, only the major versions of adobe reader come as a stand alone msi file, the rest are msp files, which patch the version to be the latest.
However, these can't be deployed with group policy, so have to applied to the msi patch. Then the whole lot can installed via group policy. The process I have been following to patch is as follows:
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Download the most recent msi package from their ftp
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run an msiexec admin install
msiexec /a AdbeRdr1010_en_US.msi -
Select a local path when it prompts for a folder to install to
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change to this local directory. Inside it, there should be an msi file created by the install, and directories containing the other files used by the installation
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Download the msp patch from adobes ftp server. This is will be found in the misc folder of the latest release
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run msiexec admin install, also using the patch against the install:
msiexec /a AdbeRdr1010_en_US.msi /p AdbeRdrUpd1013.msp -
Copy the entire folder to a network location, and configure group policy like normal to use the msi file updated by the patching on the previous step
These steps should work for deploying for both 32 and 64 bit systems