The Adobe License Manager and Acrobat

Up until now, corporate customers have generally been spared having to deal with product activation and other anti-piracy technology in the software products they buy in volume. With Acrobat 8, however, Adobe is rather quietly and somewhat tentatively introducing an embedded license control technology called the Adobe License Manager. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on myself, I seem to be the first trade pre

Up until now, corporate customers have generally been spared having to deal with product activation and other anti-piracy technology in the software products they buy in volume. With Acrobat 8, however, Adobe is rather quietly and somewhat tentatively introducing an embedded license control technology called the Adobe License Manager.

For reasons I'm not entirely clear on myself, I seem to be the first trade press person in a position to report on the Adobe License Manager (ALM). It's not that Adobe's been keeping it a secret that it planned to introduce an asset management tool that would track Adobe volume licenses for anti-piracy purposes. For months Adobe has been openly discussing it with some customers and analysts in various venues. There is now a FAQ page on ALM on Adobe's website, and the company is beginning a customer education campaign about it this week. Which makes it all the stranger that Adobe's press materials last week announcing Acrobat 8 were silent on the subject of ALM, considering that it seems like something corporate customers interested in the new Acrobat will want to know.

Perhaps that's where the tentativeness I referred to comes in. Prior to the Acrobat announcement, Adobe made the decision that for the first year of version 8 volume license customers will be able to "opt out" from using ALM. At deployment time - after the volume agreement has been negotiated and approved, in other words - the customer will have the option until Fall of 2007 to deploy Acrobat 8 software that does not have ALM embedded. In addition, Adobe has always planned an "exception" system to provide non-ALM versions to customers who can demonstrate they have an established software asset management system in place that can adequately track Adobe licenses. The details of how customers will qualify for such exceptions have not yet been worked out.

So why is Adobe doing this? "There are a number of forces that our customers tell us are marking license management more of an issue for them," said Drew McManus, director of corporate product management for Adobe. "Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory requirements are making people more aware of compliance, and customers are telling us they are getting audited more often by vendor or trade associations. Managing software licenses in a corporate environment is becoming more complex - using different tools to track them will often give you different answers."