Silently install Adobe Acrobat Reader DC

Following up on last week’s announcement of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader DC’s release, this article documents the silent install options for Reader. When it comes to deployment, you typically want a silent install so it is not hanging a computer waiting for somebody to click the ‘Next’ button.

To install the software is one part of the equation. To have it configured how you want, you will want to use the Acrobat DC Customization Wizard which can be downloaded from Adobe’s FTP site: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/AcrobatDC/misc/

You can also download the Reader DC installer as a .msi or a .exe in your language from Adobe’s FTP site: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/AcrobatDC/1500720033/

Once you download and install the Acrobat Customization Wizard DC, you’ll be able to point it towards the Reader .msi installer and create a custom transform to configure the package such as accepting the EULA automatically or disabling the Upsell services. The transform .mst file can then be used to control either the .msi or .exe installer for Reader.

The .msi installer is easy to script a silent install just using the standard msiexec parameters. The parameter /qn presents no interface while /qb presents just a progress bar, for example:

msiexec /qb /i \Server.fqdnshareLatestReaderDC.msi TRANSFORMS=\Server.fqdn\share\ReaderDC.mst

With Adobe Reader 11, I came to prefer the executable installer for my scripts. It was easier to use than stringing along each release’s .msp to patch the installer. Instead, I could just download the latest executable installer and it would install over top of the previous install. Some of those behaviors will have to be tested when the next release of Reader comes out.

The executable has different parameters than previous installers and can still take advantage of the transform configuration, for example:

AcroRdrDC1500720033_en_US.exe /sPB /rs /msi TRANSFORMS=\Server.fqdn\share\ReaderDC.mst

Executable parameters: