Adobe Flash Player ActiveX Enterprise Deployment.

Update: You might want to check out this more recent article which discusses a more reliable method of installation for SCCM users, along with blocking auto updates with scripting and Group Policy, if transforms aren’t your bag.

Another day, another Adobe related software update. Today I recieved a security bulletin notifying me of a critical update to the Adobe Flash player software. When this happens, I usually have a handful of days to prepare the update for mass deployment through ConfigMgr. The new version (10.1.53.64) is available through the Adobe website, and if you have applied for a distribution license, you can grab the MSI right now!

Unfortunately, Adobe still have not taken the time to create a reliable MSI installer, so we are still left with having to workaround the little annoyances. The main issue I face is getting Adobe Flash Player to disable its automatic update feature, since we do not want our clients going out to the big bad interwebs and pulling down all sorts of untested updates.

To remedy this, I create a text file named mms.cfg, which needs to be placed into %windir%\System32\Macromed\Flash.  The cfg file only needs to contain one line, shown below.

AutoUpdateDisable=1

Now we have the config file created, all that’s left is to create a transform file (MST) based on the downloaded MSI, which drops the config file into the location above during install. For those of you who aren’t familiar with transforming a MSI file, you can execute the following command to do so.

msiexec.exe /i "install.msi" TRANSFORMS="transform.mst" /qb RebootYesNo="No" Reboot="ReallySuppress"