Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud at a glance

The Creative Cloud desktop app is Adobe's management client for its creative software. It installs, updates and licenses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro and the rest of the suite, and it also handles fonts, cloud documents and sign-in to the organisation's account. For agencies, marketing teams and design departments it is the piece that everything else hangs off.

Adobe refreshes this client noticeably more often than the individual applications, and rolls new builds out in waves across regions and subscription types over several weeks. Its version number has four segments and moves even for small changes, so a fleet usually carries several builds side by side.

In managed environments self-update is normally disabled and distribution handed to the packaging system; otherwise clients pull updates on their own and application versions drift apart. Make sure proxies and firewalls allow Adobe's update endpoints, and after a larger jump verify that installed application versions and licence assignments still hold.