Dreamweaver Update Pains



  • A coworker of mine emailed me, the helpdesk tech, to request the Dreamweaver 8 cd again. I say again because he had tried updating 8.0 to 8.0.2, which required the CD, which he didn't have, so he cancelled the update. He emailed back today because of a note on Adobe's support forums:

     

    Note: If you press Cancel during the installation process in Windows, you will no longer be able to update Dreamweaver. To update to 8.0.2, you will need to uninstall and re-install Dreamweaver. For more information, please see Tech Note 785362aa at www.adobe.com/go/785362aa.

     

    What on earth is up with that? If you cancel the first try you lose the ability to try again? Adobe says this is an InstallShield problem, and InstallShield says it's a Windows installer problem. Supposedly this problem exists in a wide variety of programs, but I've never run across it. Anyone else?



  • I've never run into that one exactly, but I've done enough MSI (raw MSI, not that InstallShield stuff), and I know from that experience that you have to have proper rollback operations for everything.  I tend to lean towards blaming InstallShield.



  • I have seen a remarkably similar effect in Acrobat Pro.  It failed during a patch for Acrobat Pro 6.  However we had great difficulty even removing and reinstalling.  Kept throwing errors when we tried to install Acrobat Pro 7 as well.  Not much info to contribute but coincidentally this happened recently also.

     



  • Why is the ordinary cow-orker/user installing the updates to Dreamweaver? Isn't that the job of IT? ( and/or the helpdesk? ) I would think that in most jobs, it shouldn't even be possible for normal users to have access to installation media due to piracy issues (copying, installing elsewhere, etc).



  • [quote user="nuclear_eclipse"]Why is the ordinary cow-orker/user installing the updates to Dreamweaver? Isn't that the job of IT? ( and/or the helpdesk? ) I would think that in most jobs, it shouldn't even be possible for normal users to have access to installation media due to piracy issues (copying, installing elsewhere, etc).[/quote]

     

    He is IT, sort of. He's in the web programming division. We don't loan out media to other divisions, but for other in-house IT departments we let them run their own show. The rule of thumb is, if they have admin rights on their machine, we typically don't stand over their shoulders when they want to update things.



  • @tmountjr said:

    He is IT, sort of. He's in the web programming division. We don't loan out media to other divisions, but for other in-house IT departments we let them run their own show. The rule of thumb is, if they have admin rights on their machine, we typically don't stand over their shoulders when they want to update things.

    I've seen that happen too. A place I did some temporary work for (as the lone IT guy replacing the normal one while he was away) let the programmers install what they wanted. I think the programmers actually did their own OS reinstalls as required too. Oh, and I remember walking in there to see them playing Unreal Tournament and wishing I had known about the lunchtime gaming.



  • I'm just used to places where any IT-supported software is only installed/updated by IT, but that's also on Unix machines where the admins push updates to the machines every week, and the users can install anything else they want/need, assuming they have the proper privileges to compile and put in place.



  • [quote user="tmountjr"]

    He is IT, sort of. He's in the web programming division. We don't loan out media to other divisions, but for other in-house IT departments we let them run their own show. The rule of thumb is, if they have admin rights on their machine, we typically don't stand over their shoulders when they want to update things.

    [/quote]

     Same thing here. Every developer in our group has local admin rights and an MSDN subscription. You can install any tools that will help you get your job done... We have a fairly self-policed group (you don't want to be the guy that broke the build / broke your machine / etc)


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