Charlotte,

I haven't seen suite recognition for Adobe products within ZAM yet. To identify those products I have used (as you referenced), the software collections. It is a very tedious process to do this with Creative Suites, especially if you deploy many of the collections from Adobe. Making the distinction between the various suites will be your challenge.

Without knowing more about your deployments, etc here is a broad brush recommendation that might help get you started. It is by no means complete. Use the collections feature of ZAM and start with this url Adobe - Creative Suite 4: Compare editions to distinguish one suite from another. If you are able for example to control your suites down to say 3 of these, then you might be able to identify the suite by what is unique in that grouping and name it accordingly. Insist that when one of our 3 example suites are installed that the full complement of components are installed or just declare to yourself that if the unique product is found you will consider it to be suite "A". Work with your desktop group to only permit those specific suites to be installed to help control the quality of your assumptions.

The issue I found with using the collections is once you have pulled one component into your collection view, you can not reuse it for inclusion in an different collection even though another suite may share that same relationship. Maybe others here have found a way around that ??

It is not a perfect process by any stretch but with ISO standards in developement to help with Software recognition I am optimistic that this one will be addressed in the near future.

Thanks, Bryant

blcald wrote:

>
> Charlotte,
>
> I haven't seen suite recognition for Adobe products within ZAM yet.
> To identify those products I have used (as you referenced), the
> software collections. It is a very tedious process to do this with
> Creative Suites, especially if you deploy many of the collections
> from Adobe. Making the distinction between the various suites will
> be your challenge.
>
> Without knowing more about your deployments, etc here is a broad brush
> recommendation that might help get you started. It is by no means
> complete. Use the collections feature of ZAM and start with this url
> 'Adobe - Creative Suite 4: Compare editions'
> (http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/compare/) to distinguish
> one suite from another. If you are able for example to control your
> suites down to say 3 of these, then you might be able to identify the
> suite by what is unique in that grouping and name it accordingly.
> Insist that when one of our 3 example suites are installed that the
> full complement of components are installed or just declare to
> yourself that if the unique product is found you will consider it to
> be suite "A". Work with your desktop group to only permit those
> specific suites to be installed to help control the quality of your
> assumptions.
>
> The issue I found with using the collections is once you have pulled
> one component into your collection view, you can not reuse it for
> inclusion in an different collection even though another suite may
> share that same relationship. Maybe others here have found a way
> around that ??
>
> It is not a perfect process by any stretch but with ISO standards in
> developement to help with Software recognition I am optimistic that
> this one will be addressed in the near future.
>
> Thanks, Bryant

Hi All,


I got around this issue by creating a UDF that looks up the GUID of the
uninstall icon you see in Control Panel detailing the Suite name..

Hope this helps

--

Very creative, I like the concept, seems it has application in other tough areas beyond Adobe.

Great job and thanks for sharing.

John,

Can you share the string used in your UDF to pull back the suite name? I am thinking that by using that value and defined under a "Local Product" then it will appear in the SW compliance module just as if it were in the PRU as a gap stop until Novell remedies.

Thanks, Bryant

This is bringing this back no doubt but could some provide a slightly more verbose response? We are find the need to organize our Adobe products as well and would appreciate any help in this regard....thanks.

Clayton
HSD

We've found that by finding those stations where the product is located on....then collecting exclusive exe's as a part of the product ( which may be differentiated by filesize as part of the collection ). Then creating a product in ZAM with multiple exe's and identifying it as a Suite->Graphics we've been able to track down which have the suites. Trick is to use as many as possible but not so many that it will get missed by zam....I think one of our's includes 9 exe's.....works well so far.