Deploying Adobe Acrobat Reader/Pro with Patch My PC

If you are using Patch My PC and Intune for publishing and deploying third-party apps and updates to your Windows devices, chances are you might have run in to this problem. If you have assigned Adobe Acrobat Reader DC as a required app for all your devices or users, you might see this error in Intune for devices where Adobe Acrobat Pro is already installed: Fatal error during installation (0x80070643)

This error happens because:

1. The Adobe Acrobat Reader installation fails when Adobe Acrobat Pro is already installed. This is because the Reader and Pro versions are essentially the same application but with different features enabled.
   
2. The Adobe Acrobat Reader detection script provided by Patch My PC doesn’t detect that Adobe Acrobat Pro is installed.

So how can you tell them apart. Well, it seems that this registry value can be used:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\Installer

Value: SCAPackageLevel
Value = 1 : Reader
Value = 3 : Pro

Solution

To solve this problem…

1. Add a requirement rule in the Intune application. The rule should check that the registry value is NOT equal to 3.

2. In the Patch My PC publishing service GUI under Intune apps, right-click the Adobe Acrobat Reader application and select “Override Win32 application options”.

3. Select the check mark “Copy the requirements from previously created applications…” and then click OK. This will ensure that your requirement rule is copied over to new versions of the application when published by Patch My PC.

4. Now you should start to see the failed application deployments change to “Not applicable” as shown below. And your devices will no longer attempt to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader as long as the Pro version is installed.

Bonus tip!

If you want to speed things up when re-evaluating whether apps in the Company Portal are available, required, installed etc. you can change the version number of the app in Intune and then sync again. By the way, you can change the version number to anything you like or even change it to a previous version. All that matters is that the Intune Management Extension apparently detects that the version number has changed and almost immediately re-evaluates the status of the app.