Solved an installation problem with Adobe eLearning Suite

This is a tale of workflow woe with Adobe eLearning Suite. I was upgrading from a trial version to a full version and it was far more complicated than it should have been, due to a poorly designed installer and an unnecessarily opaque error message. Adobe needs to fix this to save themselves money and to reduce aggravation for customers, for a pretty common workflow.

tldr; When upgrading from a trial version, no need to reinstall. Just type in the license key in any product within the suite. Uninstallers can be found in Applications/Utilities.

I’m working on a Health IT project with colleagues at UCI and Harvard. As part of that, I need to create some online tutorials for physicians using the Adobe eLearning Suite. I bought the produce from the UCI Computerstore and was trying to install it from DVDs to my MacBook Air running OSX 10.7.4.

After double-clicking on the installer, I got the error message: “Installer failed to initialize. Please download Adobe Suport Advisor to detect the problem.” I was unhappy about having to install an application that I didn’t know anything about, but intrigued that there might Adobe might be clever enough to have software to solve install problems. So, I gamely installed and ran Support Advisor, but it didn’t find any problems and told me to contact support.

I thought the problem might have something to do with the multiple Adobe suites that I have installed. I have CS5.5 (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign) and a trial version of the eLearning Suite. I searched without success for an uninstaller, using spotlight, Google, and even the Adobe forums.

So, I called support. That’s an hour of my life that I’m not getting back. I spent the first 5-10 minutes giving the CSR all my details. Then she went away for 20 minutes, came back and asked some of the same questions again. Then we set up Adobe Connect (more foreign software to install), so she could see my screen. She verified my error message. Verified my CS5.5 install. Located the Uninstallers in Applications/Utilities. (So that’s where they are!) Asked me to run an application from the eLearning Suite. Upon startup, it asked for a license key, which I entered. Captivate, along with all the other applications in the suite, now works.

I don’t know about you, but this Installer is busted. When someone is trying to install software that is already on the machine, it should do something other than “Installer failed to initialize.” This is something that just about everyone else, e.g. Microsoft, Apple, and others, have figured out. Moving from a trial version to a full version is a fairly common transition, or should be.

There is no indication that one can enter the license key for a Suite into the individual applications. Or that entering it into one application does it for all of them.

There are uninstallers for the individual applications within their respective directories, but no indication that the application to uninstall an entire suite can be found in Applications/Utilities. And I looked.

This isn’t rocket science, Adobe. Get it right.

Such a simple problem. Such an easy fix. Such a stupid error message.