Adobe will soon ship CS3 - Wonder if they fixed the upgrade installers?
Unless you've been hiding under a rock the last few days, or don't really care at all, you'll know that Adobe has announced the CS3 edition of products and will be shipping (most) editions soon.
Set aside all the fancy new stuff (and there is some GREAT new stuff in there almost regardless which products you use), one of the things I'm most anxiously waiting to see is if they *finally* fixed their bloody installers when it comes to the upgrade products.Now this has been such a big annoyance for *years*, and with almost all Adobe products. You get your new Creative Suite/Acrobat/whatever, pop the (first) CD in, see the installer launch, and then:
"This is an upgrade product, please insert a CD for a previous version of the product or point the installer to the location where it is installed"
Now, here in the IT department the by far most common condition we install these apps under is after a reinstall/new machine setup, meaning there's no qualifying product installed. So we pop in a previous version, any previous version (last time I installed CS2 Premium (upg from PS) I went through 4 different Photoshop version CDs). Same happens with our Acrobat (v5/v6) installers. Does the installer recognise it? Of course not. So we get to call Adobe.
You might think this is a simple matter. Just dial a local number, get through to someone, they'll provide a fix, and you're done? Ooooh, no. First you get through to one kind of support. And they always say, without exception, that I'm in the wrong place and they'll put me through to another kind of support (which is not in the phone menu at the start). When I get there, about half of the time they tell me they're not the right instance and try to send me back to technical support. Anyways, when we settle the who-can-and-cannot-help situation, we're down to the actual problem. Obviously they can provide no general workaround for this, so each time we need to click some buttons, get a "secret" menu, read in some numbers, and get some back to type in. To make things better, when you call Adobe from Norway it's pretty much open which Nordic country the person you end up with is from, and if you end up with a Finn with... basic Swedish skills, that number exchange can get pretty interesting.
Generally this exercise takes anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes, or several tries, depending on the time spent in line and the number of times they put you back and forth internally. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
For Acrobat we found a workaround, turns out the standard CDs also accept our previous version serials, so we use the full version CD instead of the upgrade CDs, saves us a bunch of time. Its probably a violation of some part of the EULA, but to be honest... by now I don't care. I've spent way to much of my life on the phone with Adobe already.
As I said, I sure hope they fixed it...
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