“Slipstream” Adobe Acrobat Pro Updates

Seems like one of those really annoying things out there is deploying an installation of Adobe Acrobat Pro with all (or most) of the updates at once. Of course, this pertains to the Windows version. After doing some intense research and looking through the bits and pieces if suggestions that are out there, I found a much easier way to integrate all the updates into one package.

This one is tricky, you can’t just use the traditional method of running msiexec with the /p parameter and patch over the MSI. What makes it worse is that certain updates can’t be slip streamed or they will prevent future updates from being applied. One can only imagine the headaches that can come out of trying to deploy this without having to install the numerous patches after.

As of writing, the Adobe website only offers Acrobat Pro 9.0 as a download (trial) and it is likely the same for those that have access to the Adobe Licensing website. The problem is that the latest update brings Acrobat Pro to version 9.3.4. How? Via 10 .msp patches: 9.1.0, 9.1.1, 9.1.2, 9.1.3, 9.2.0, 9.3.0, 9.3.1, 9.3.2, 9.3.3, 9.3.4. These msp’s range from a mere 1.6MB to a whopping 126.7MB each!

Enough chatter, let’s get started. Looking at the Adobe knowledgebase article, there’s a specific order & specific patches we must apply upon “slipstreaming”. Here’s the website: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/498/cpsid_49880.html.

In short, only “Quarterly” updates can be slipstreamed in order to allow future updates to be integrated. So to bring 9.0 up to 9.3.3 (can’t do 9.3.4 because it’s a “Security” update, we need the following patches:

9.1.0 :: AcroProStdUpd910_T1T2_incr.msp
9.1.2 :: AcrobatUpd912_all_incr.msp
9.2.0 :: AcrobatUpd920_all_incr.msp
9.3.0 :: AcrobatUpd930_all_incr.msp
9.3.2 :: AcrobatUpd932_all_incr.msp
9.3.3 :: AcrobatUpd933_all_incr.msp

You can download them from Adobe here: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows.

You will also need a copy of the Acrobat Pro 9.0 installation. If you are a retail user, you can download the Trial version from Adobe’s public website. If you are an enterprise or volume license user, you must download from the Adobe LWS. Both user types can use the original installation media (CD/DVD) but make sure you substitute the corporate for the retail version or vice versa.

If you downloaded the installers, extract them to a folder. If you have the the CD/DVD, copy the “Acrobat Professional 9” folder to a writable location. Inside this folder you should see setup.exe, AcroPro.msi, Data1.cab, setup.ini, a few mst’s, etc.

Now copy the .msp files (updates) you downloaded into the same folder. Open up setup.ini in an editor like notepad and underneath the “[Product]” section, append the following to the end of the section:

PATCH="AcroProStdUpd910_T1T2_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd912_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd920_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd930_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd932_all_incr.msp;AcrobatUpd933_all_incr.msp"

Save & close. Remember, when a future quarterly patch comes out, save it to the same folder and just add it’s file name to the end of this string inside setup.ini.

Now we have an installer that will install all the quarterly updates when we run setup.exe. Now just configure your deployment solution to copy this entire folder to the client and run setup.exe with the required parameters (no reboot, silent, etc – you can fund them by running “setup.exe /?”).

Thanks, Adobe, for making this such a nuisance.