I'm an IT Professional working at the University of Illinois, specializing in Enterprise Endpoint Management (aka, how do you get all that software onto a BUNCH of machines, and then keep them up-to-date and secure).
We have a highly automated system for acquiring updates for all of our software from various vendors which allows us to keep all of our Adobe Software, Microsoft Software, SPSS, SAS, Wolfram, software up-to-date and secure. We do not have, nor do we want to setup up an Enterprise Update Server for Adobe... Microsoft... Wolfram, nor be required to manually login to a different 'dashboard' and learn each vendor's process for obtaining updates.
AutoPkg (GitHub - autopkg/autopkg: Automating packaging and software distribution on OS X. ) and Aamporter (GitHub - timsutton/aamporter: Utility to batch download Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud updates and optionally import them in… ) are open source and well maintained and A LOT easier and simpler to setup and automate than AAMEE or an Adobe Update Server but they REQUIRE download links to work. And most importantly ONE server handles ALL of your software updates for almost ALL your 3rd party software.
Adobe's decision to nix the download links broke all of our automation and our users are now struggling to use their Adobe products. This does not look good for us, as IT Professionals, and it doesn't look good for Adobe.
Enterprise IT needs these links back. Yesterday. And if you could make Tim Sutton's work easier (Aamporter) that would be ideal.
Thank you.
In the future it would be in our collective best interests of stakeholders -- Adobe, Enterprise IT Professionals and the creative people we support -- if we had a better communication channel to work out the impact of installer decisions PRIOR to changes being implemented so the automation systems that we use remain simple, streamlined and stable.