Opinion: Adobe's activation system conflicts with a few RAID controllers, causing hassles for some individual users. Such concerns should be just as important to the company as its big-picture enterprise goals.Got
RAID? If you're running Acrobat 7 with an array, and you're having activation issues, you're not alone.
The blogosphere's jumping, and an Acrobat customer e-mailed us about the problem, in which Adobe's activation scheme mistook his Level 1 RAID system—a scheme in which a system stores data on multiple hard drives simultaneously for backup or increased speed—as an attempt to install Acrobat on multiple computers.
An Adobe customer-service representative told the customer that he'd have to get a volume license for Acrobat Pro. After a visit to the Adobe Web site, he did the math: The change would entail at minimum one of the following: 10 Acrobat 7 Pro upgrade licenses; four new Acrobat 7 Pro single-user boxes; or 15 Acrobat 7 Standard upgrade licenses to meet the minimum of 1,500 points required.
In the least-cost scheme, this represented an outlay of $1,200 to $1,500—just to enable him to use a single copy of Acrobat 7 on his machine.
This customer could lay out the dough, or he could call Adobe for a new activation number every time he rebooted his computer, which is exactly what he did for a two-week period in February before crying "uncle." At that point, he contemplated switching to competing software for his business and ceasing using Adobe software—just as his business was about to upgrade old versions of Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator to CS versions.
To its credit, Adobe dealt with the situation immediately after we inquired about the problem, providing the customer with a copy of Acrobat 7 that doesn't require activation.
But the RAID problem is a known issue inside Adobe, and it doesn't just stop with Acrobat, as this Adobe Photoshop CS tech doc shows. In fact, Adobe confirmed that it uses the same system with the versions of InDesign, Illustrator and its digital video products that require activation, too.
"There have been some isolated instances of activation conflicts with RAID drives, and we have been working with these customers on a case-by-case basis to try to understand the issues," said Adobe's Mihir Nanavati, senior product manager for license management technologies.
Nanavati went on to explain that the specific issue was probably that the customer's RAID drives were generating discrete "machine disk identifiers," or making Acrobat think there was more than one computer trying to access a single license. That or a software/system conflict somewhere.
He also indicated that the customer-service rep who initially told our reader to purchase a volume license was in the wrong, and that customers experiencing RAID activation issues don't have to purchase volume licenses to get past the problem. Customer service has since been set straight in this regard, he said.
"We are committed to ensuring that our loyal and honest customers are not adversely impacted by Adobe's license-management technology," Nanavati said. "In the rare cases where there is an issue like this one, we work with the customer one-on-one to find an appropriate solution."
All of this hoo-ha perfectly encapsulates the enigma with which Adobe has been wrestling since about Acrobat 5, when it became obvious that PDF would be great for large-scale applications such as IRS tax forms: How can Adobe please enterprise customers "in the bush" while protecting existing licenses in the hands of creative professionals?
With the creative pros, Adobe needs to prevent extra copies from proliferating, yet it must give business customers the data redundancy they need to survive.
Adobe's on the case—Nanavati said Adobe engineers are working with the customers and attempting to recreate the RAID problems in their test labs.
That's good, because activation-free copies are just a Band-Aid on the cut. If the company doesn't fix this activation conflict right now, the issue could threaten Adobe's growth in the enterprise sector, which has been fueling record revenues (PDF file).
"What it means to me is that software vendors can truly get so mired in their own problems that they neglect the basics of everyday standards that facilitate the use of their products," said William Hurley, a senior analyst for applications and software infrastructure at the Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass.
"I'm not suggesting that everybody using Adobe will also be using RAID on their personal computer, but that ignoring a technology function that is as common and well-understood as RAID is today betrays a level of navel-gazing that does not benefit end users on the whole," Hurley said.
Adobe points out that its activation system doesn't conflict with RAID in general, but with a few controllers. Isolated or not, these incidents should serve as a reminder to Adobe that keeping up with single end-user concerns such as supporting RAID should be just as important as the company's big-picture goals such as developing advanced PDF forms servers and enterprise process-management systems.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
Document Management 
