Systems Management

What business requirement are you trying to find with the metering.
As in how will this support decision making?

Please keep in mind clients can have Acrobat installed if they have creative suite installed.
Also depending on your environment, Acrobat might be configured to be the default PDF reader, instead of reader.
Meaning you will see a spike in use, when then open pdfs to read while on the internet.

thanks for the reply.

The main thing we are trying to do right now is work out who has adobe writer installed but hasnt used it, so we can move the license to another PC.

Yeah, its really tricky. I thought this would be a fairly common sort of query though?

I guess because people can run acrobat without using the pdf writer components, then it seems better to use distiller.exe?

With Distiller installed clients will be able to print to the created pdf printer from other non adobe applications.
So perhaps distiller is your best bet due to multiple entry points.

Perhaps others will chime in here..

If you havent already consider something like PDF creator, as a stock standard applicaiton (tier 1 application).
Then only clients with advanced requirements need Acobat Pro, saving on lic cost.

thanks, thats what Im thinking. Im going to try get in contact with our adobe rep, see what they recommend. But if anyone else has any ideas im still keen to hear


yeah we are trying to save on license costs now, so moving unused ones around for now is the first step

Why not create a collection based on the presence of the application (either by name or product Id), that way you get it everywhere (even on machines where it doesn't get used)......

Im not sure what you mean. Im only trying to work out which PCs have it installed, but are not using it to create pdf's

update: I've tested it out and noticed that even if you create a pdf from within adobe, it still uses distiller.exe, so I'm going to use that for the metering