Deploying Adobe Reader with Intune/Endpoint Manager ought to be a simple task, but it’s not always as straightforward as it should be. Despite not being a Microsoft product, Adobe Reader ought to integrate easily into Intune. However, Adobe has made things more complicated in recent years by pushing users toward their Creative Cloud ecosystem. This shift makes it harder to deploy the standalone Adobe PDF Reader, especially if it’s just the basic Reader required without the additional apps like Photoshop.

PDF (Portable Document Format) was introduced by Adobe in 1992 and adopted as an international standard in 2008. It still is still one of the most widely used formats for document sharing across different devices and platforms. While other PDF readers exist—like Microsoft Edge—Adobe Reader has historically been the best at rendering documents with precision. It handles fonts, tables, forms, and other elements more reliably than many alternatives.

Because it’s free and user-friendly, many businesses still prefer to include Adobe Reader in their Intune deployments by default. However, due to Adobe’s shift toward Creative Cloud, it’s become trickier for IT admins to manage mass deployments of the standalone PDF Reader. Still, if it’s for the best PDF viewing experience for users, it’s still worth the extra effort to deploy Adobe Reader.

What we did to get this to work

OK, So it’s this installer – (Download) – at the time of writing – it’s the Acrobat Pro Win 64 installer. Although a deployment might need a different version – i.e.: there’s still 32 bit machines. With this, unpack into a Folder. Then download the Adobe Customisation Wizard – (Download). To run this, if not already installed, download the Visual C++ Redistributable – 32 bit – from Microsoft here – (Download) – we can’t fathom why it doesn’t install it itself, but there we go.

Open up the Customization Wizard, and point it at the Folder unpacked earlier. Our general preference is to have the following options:

• Supress display of End User Licence Agreement
• Make Acrobat the default PDF Viewer
• Remove previous versions of Adobe & Reader
• Enable Optimization
• Silently (no interface/GUI)
• Supress reboot
• Supress sign-in in Acrobat

There are a whole number of other options – such as whether there is a desktop shortcut or not. Or whether certain features in Acrobat Reader should be enabled or not. Then save the changes.

For the next step, download the rather pompously named “Microsoft Win32 Content Prep Tool” –  (Here). Unpack this to a folder.

Go into a Command Prompt and go to the folder that contains the Prep Tool. Run the IntuneWinAppUtil.exe and it’ll ask where the source is (so give it the path where Acrobat is – the whole path to the directory that contains the .MSI file). From that, it’ll ask for the setup executable – in this case, it’s setup.exe, and then where to put the output file. Annoyingly, it always creates the final “.intunewin” file with a generic name, but it can be easily renamed.

Getting the package into inTune

Then Upload this into inTune and process as a Windows app (win32) and upload the file. There is a need to manually specify the install and uninstall commands, which are:

Install: setup.exe /S
Uninstall: msiexec /x {AC76BA86-7AD7-1033-7B44-AC0F074E4100} /q

The {AC7…4100} code above is based on the current version, but check this. To do this, install the version of Acrobat downloaded above on a test computer/VM, go into the Registry Editor and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall – and check each option to the find the relevant folder for Adobe. The code shown on the left hand side is the one to include as part of the msiexec /x command above.

There is a need to detect if the install was successful or not. The best way we’ve found is to check if the Adobe Reader.exe has been installed or not.

One of our experiences here is that if the full version of Adobe Creative Suite is installed, these will clash with each other. We would suggest creating a specific group to exclude devices that have the full version of Creative Suite. When setting up the inTune import, it can then be set as ‘Excluded’ on the inTune App Setup. The downside is that this is a huge file – 1.5GB+. This also means that when uninstalling the PC will download the whole 1.5GB file to uninstall it. However, although a bit of a kludge, it does work.

This was based on what worked in March 2025 – with all these things, it can change very quickly as new versions of things are released, etc.. If it’s all a bit much, why not find out a bit more about Verstech, or get in touch today?