Dear support,
We are in the middle of rolling out a new Adobe AIR-based educational application. This application is targeted in large part at educational organizations. In these scenarios, an automated deployment of both the AIR runtime and the AIR application is a requirement. For most of these organizations, solutions like SMS, SMCC and Tivoli are far too expensive. Many of them rely on Group Policy based rollouts instead. Unfortunately, the enterprise deployment guidance provided by Adobe states that GPO is not supported, yet provides no alternative. This has put the burden on us as an ISV to work together with client systems administrators to find an alternative solution. Currently we find we have to tell administrators to resort to manual scripting in these cases, which is of course far from optimal.
In the course of our research, we stumbled on a lot of blogs, forums, etc discussing this issue. It would seem that the majority of small-to-middle scale organizations cannot afford a solution like SMS, SMCC and Tivoli, so there is a real need for a deployment solution compatible with the needs of these clients.
The enterprise deployment guidance document asks us to contact an email address for information about when GPO support will be available. But as I think this is a topic of general interest, I am posting this on the forum instead. We would like to know what Adobe's plans in this direction are, and if any advice is available.
We have invested a lot in switching to Adobe AIR for this application, and so far I must say it has generally been a great experience. I am hoping that these details can be resolved quickly as well, so that the barrier to adoption is lowered further
Thanks, Chris