I see that for the Adobe Customization Wizard 8 there is a function to remove all previous versions of Acrobat and Reader 5, 6 and 7 prior to the installation of Acrobat 8. Can we also customize the Installshield Tuner 7.0 to remove all the previous versions of Acrobat and Reader 5 and above prior to deploying Acrobat 7 to the user?
We'll go from most behaved to least.
1) You have a totally homogeneous environemnt and are using one of the touted corporate package distribution tools (Tivoli (IBM), Microsoft, Zen (Novell), etc.) As part of your deployment script have them remove the tool.
2) Tuner Launched Script - you can script the uninstall via .CMD file and have that executed via Tuner (one of the options is to have it run an .EXE.) That .EXE could then launch a command prompt and run the script. Also included in the script a .REG to remove the Acrobat entries from HKLM and HKCU.
This method seems to work when it is "user initiated" but has issues during an automated process.
3) What I will call "Smash with a hammer" An indicriminate purge of the installed Acrobat directory. Again, this can be done via script. This is only partially beneficial - there will be some remnants around. The main plus to this is it prevents the prior version's exe's and DLL's from interferring from the new installation.
4) Seek and Destroy - set forth an army of sneakers to manually execute the removal. The most costly, and least desireable, but the one to make sure all the machines in labs, closets, hidden spaces are cleaned up.
A google search will net you a couple of technotes on how to manually completely remove Acrobat and Reader from a machine where the uninstall routine has become corrupt.
Douglas Hanna is a member of the Production Print Technology team at Aon.
www.aonhewitt.com