Adobe Flash Player & Shockwave Player Corporate Distribution i.e. redistributable binary

System Requirements:

  • Adobe Flash Player Plug-in
  • Adobe Shockwave Plug-in

The Problem:

Adobe are Google inept…

Here’s a really crazy idea, I want to redistribute Flash to PC’s without going to each PC and installing it by hand!

Obviously I’m off the planet on that one, having 600 workstations that got updated to Macromedia’s Flash 8.2x plug-in over a year ago because I wrote an installer for the blessed thing by hand. 30 workstations which had anything from flash 4 to Flash 8.2x on (which I did upgrade by hand).

Google anything to do with Flash, Deployment, Corporate, Redist, Redistributable… and you’ll get nothing back.

Shockwave is even worse, we wont go there. Suffice it to say much bandwidth was lost on the 30 workstations and the 600 never got touched, despite progressive urgent security updates coming out of Macromedia/Adobe on the poor state of their plug-in.

If anyone from Adobe is reading this, yes, I am irate, you wasted a significant amount of time which I will never get back again! LEARN TO MAKE A WEBSITE.

The Fix:

When Adobe released Flash 9.x, they changed the install system to a binary cab, the installer engine in cab 1, named “Ultrashim.cab” and then the data cab after it. For some reason I couldn’t build a hand installer on these because the thing never registered properly with MSIE.

When they release 9.0.47.0 they removed the second cab completely, favouring some proprietary installer system in ultra-shim. If you pulled ultrashim apart and manually ran it, it would (eventually) install the 1.5MB data download after a significant wait time. Thing is that in my experience users get a little irate if they have to sit at a boot screen waiting for an unspecified amount of time while some unnecessary little loader daemon suckles the proverbial teat of Adobe Systems Inc.

For anyone who wants to look, here are Ultrashim.cab and the “really clever Adobe, you are so hilarious and clever” data file install_flash.foo.s.

 

Contrary to popular belief, and for those who don’t have enough hours in their day to read the small print on every Adobe.com page with “flash” in the text (and who are frantically Googling the topic). Adobe DO have corporate deployment systems for Flash Player and for Shockwave Player, they just don’t want anyone to find it.

Adobe will give you either a .exe installer (which does not have any silent install prompts that I can find) or a .msi which obviously does for both browser technologies. You can get hold of the MSIE version and the non-MSIE version (firefox and what have you), as well as multi-language and Linux/Unix/Mac OS versions.

 

How to get it

You have to site license yourself for it I’m afraid. The small print can be found here.

The following URL’s were valid at the time of publishing.

If you want Flash Player 7,8,9 only go to:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flash

If you want Shockwave Player 10 only go to:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=shockwave

If you want Flash Player 7,8,9 and Shockwave Player 10 go to:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flash_shockwave

It is nothing more than a con to get you to sign up to their mail system really. so Adobe, yet again I’m not impressed. You’ll register, they’ll email you your welcome to Adobe fun email and behind that will come the automated download links.

I cannot post the download URL’s because the URL information contains the licensee registration ID. I can state however that the redists seem to be up-to-date at least in terms of Flash 9.