Usage guide: Adobe Acrobat licensing

Introduction

This library pack is designed to assist in the investigation of the presence and usage of the Adobe Acrobat application across your environment. It also aims to help optimize licensing costs by removing any unused copies and downgrading Pro editions where necessary.

Please keep in mind this is a guide and represents just some of the potential insight and actions you can take. There are many use cases and specific scenarios that you might uncover in your environment.

Ensure your library pack is properly configured by following the steps highlighted in its configuration guide:

Configuration guide: Adobe Acrobat licensing

Pack structure

Overview of Adobe Acrobat instances, editions, and usage

The "Adobe Acrobat licensing" live dashboard acts as the central point of this library pack. This dashboard allows you to investigate the presence and usage of the Adobe Acrobat application across your environment. You can then use this data to optimize licensing costs by removing any unused copies and downgrading Pro editions where necessary.

Advanced troubleshooting and remediation

For more in-depth investigations, you can rely on the results of specific data-gathering remote actions.

Get Windows Registry key values remote action is used to populate the live dashboard and should already be scheduled. You can query the results by investigating KPIs from the Live dashboard or from your own investigations.

Get Windows Registry key values: Returns the value data of up to three Windows Registry properties. This retrieves the value of the registry key indicating if Adobe Acrobat Pro or Standard is installed.

Use cases

To optimize your Adobe Acrobat licensing costs, you can use the following two supported scenarios with this dashboard data:

The scenario where the Adobe Acrobat application is not in use: By using widgets that indicate devices where the app is installed but not in use, you can target a remote action that will remove the app from those devices.
The scenario where the Adobe Acrobat application is in use but a downgrade may be considered: by obtaining a list of users currently logged in to devices with the Adobe Acrobat Pro application, you can initiate an "Adobe software usage assessment" campaign. This campaign will prompt users to indicate whether they are utilizing the advanced features of the Pro edition of this application or if they are interested in downgrading to the Standard version.

The application is not in use

Using widgets in the Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe Acrobat Standard tabs that specify devices where the application is not in use, you can list those devices using the "Drill down to devices" menu option and then target a remote action to the listed devices that will remove the application if necessary.

The application is in use but a downgrade may be considered

Using the widgets in the Adobe Acrobat Pro tab that indicate the devices on which the application is installed and used, you can list those devices using the "Drill down to devices" menu option.

Next, you can use the "Drill down to users" menu option to get a list of the users who last logged in on those devices.

Using this list, you can target an "Adobe software usage assessment" campaign to ask selected users whether they are using the advanced features of the Pro version of that application or if they are ready to downgrade to the Standard version.

Based on user feedback, you can decide who needs the advanced features of the Pro edition of this software and who can downgrade the application to the Standard edition to reduce costs and not affect user productivity.