Mass deploying Adobe Flash Player updates

Jan 18, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: tom larkin

If you are in a situation where you have a large number of Macintosh computers at your work and you need to push out a Flash update to all your clients it can be tedious. The Adobe installers are filled with fluff and GUI options that do not make it easy to mass deploy.

Depending on what enterprise solutions you use, this method should be applicable to most if not all of them. Casper, Absolute, Munki, or even ARD Admin can most likely use this method. I've tested this in Casper and it does work for me.

Simply download the latest Flash Player to your Mac. Right click on the Adobe Installer and view the Package Contents. From there navigate to the Resources folder. Inside there you will see an Adobe Flash Player.pkg file you can simply drag and drop into your enterprise tool set or even push out via ARD Admin. The PKG file will install the needed updates. So from there you just need to use whatever tools you have to push out that PKG file. I suppose you could also write a shell script that uses the command line install for the PKG as well.

I have tested this and it works, and the users can even be using web browsers during the install and the next time they quit and relaunch the browser the updates will be applied. I only tested this on Firefox, however, other browsers may want to be quit first before the install.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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