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

The way Adobe has described it to me, ALM sounds like something of a cross between product activation DRM technology and a software asset management tool. When a user installs Acrobat, the ALM software will request an "e-license" from a server that can be either on the corporate network or an Adobe-hosted server accessed via the Internet. As long as the customer has enough e-licenses remaining, the installation will proceed with the end user having little interaction with ALM. If licenses are running short, the customer's ALM administrator is alerted. Customers will even have a certain grace period during which they may be in "overdraft" with more Acrobat copies installed than licenses before attempts to install new copies will fail.

Even when the customer has exceeded their licenses, Adobe says the compliance information will stay with the customer and will not be relayed to Adobe. "In designing ALM over the last three years, we had a number of guiding principles," said McManus. "Customers must be able to buy and deploy our products just as they always have, it has to be non-intrusive for end users, and it has to be completely anonymous so we're not learning anything about the customer's compliance. So it alerts the customer if you're maxing out, but it doesn't alert Adobe."

ALM will not have the usage reporting capabilities of a full-fledged software asset management system, so while it will tell you when you don't have enough licenses, it won't necessarily make it clear when you have more licenses than you really need. And in a large corporation over time the count might get artificially high because, like all anti-piracy technology, ALM won't deal well with hardware failures. Uninstalling Acrobat will bring up a procedure that returns the e-license to the corporate pool, but getting credit for the license that was on a dead PC may require a phone call to Adobe customer service.

Over the last few months, McManus says that Adobe has been running field tests of ALM with some of its customers. Predictably enough, he says the response has been overwhelmingly positive, but clearly some of the feedback they received helped lead to the decision to make ALM use voluntary over the next year. "One thing we saw was that deploying the system just to manage Acrobat was going to be a problem in some environments where they would prefer to be able to use it across the entire Adobe product line," McManus says. "We will be introducing ALM on other products and platforms, but we're just not there yet. Also, with many of our larger customers, deploying any new technology requires an evaluation period on their part, and we didn't want to cloud the Acrobat 8 purchase decision with that process."

In fact, cynics might suggest that the prospect of the ALM becoming mandatory next year could spur corporate customers to adopt Acrobat 8 more quickly than they might otherwise, just so they can get the software without ALM embedded. But, even for those who aren't so cynical, the Adobe License Manager is going to raise a number of questions. For example, do corporate customers really want to have to deal with vendor-specific license control systems? In tomorrow's story we'll discuss that issue and more.

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