Primeo Energie – Automated Adobe license management via Federated ID.

Challenge.

Primeo Energie has been successfully using Adobe Acrobat for distributing, editing and storing documents for many years. In the past, every employee received a personal licence that was linked to their own Adobe ID. Even though Adobe’s Admin Console is a central admin portal, in conventional licencing models designed for single users or businesses with a small headcount, each licence has to be maintained individually making licence management a real headache.

This created a huge amount of work for  the IT team. What’s more, employees were constantly receiving subscriber e-mails from Adobe which were irrelevant, but that wasn’t the only issue. Alongside the Active Directory login for the company, the staff also had to separately sign in to Acrobat using their Adobe IDs, and since those licences ran out at the end of 2020, Primeo Energie was in need of a new licencing solution anyway.

Solution.

Primeo Energie has been working with Bechtle as their software supplier and consultant for many years. While on the lookout for a new and improved solution for their Acrobat licences, Markus Bertschmann’s IT project team approached Bechtle in the autumn of 2020. After discussing the various options available, it became clear the VIP Enterprise model combined with a connection between Adobe’s licencing management and the company’s own Active Directory would be the best fit for Primeo Energie.

VIP Enterprise is a flexible subscription licencing program for business with changing requirements, a duration of one to three years and comprehensive licence management features. The program also supports authentication using federated IDS. In contrast to personal Adobe IDs, the management of user identities remains under the company’s control and login to Acrobat DC is through single sign-on via a SAML2-compliant identity provider such as Microsoft Azure AD.

Today, it’s easy for Primeo Energie to manage their Acrobat  licences : The local Active Directory’s user groups are first synchronised with Azure AD and then with the Adobe Document Cloud using the Azure Connector. Each group is then assigned the correct product profile. This enables user settings to be managed through local AD groups before being automatically transmitted to Adobe. “The project was technically quite simple and could be implemented by ourselves”, explains Markus Bertschmann. Despite that, having Bechtle as a partner was indispensable. “Bechtle has dedicated experts in the Adobe environment. Just finding the right licencing model requires a lot of experience and Bechtle has a direct link to Adobe for any in-depth questions.” The  employees had no trouble switching to the new model. All they had to do was log out of Acrobat DC and then back in again using the company account.

Business benefits.

With VIP Enterprise as a licencing model, the connection between the local Active Directory and Acrobat DC via Azure AD, and Adobe federated IDs as a method of authentication considerably reduces both admin and complexity when it comes to managing Adobe licences. Many of the processes that had previously been handled manually are now completely automated. Markus Bertschmann mentions one example: “When an employee leaves the company, their Adobe licence is no longer deactivated manually, but automatically reassigned.”

Single sign-on means that employees have access to Acrobat as soon as they have logged into their company account, and compliance benefits from the fact that the use of various features and additional services can be controlled centrally. This is important because, depending on the company, it may be preferable if the employees can only save documents in the company’s own repository instead of in the Adobe Cloud as well.

Partners.