Product profiles and license assignment

When you purchase Adobe licenses for your organization, product profiles deliver them to your users. Rather than assigning licenses individually to each person, you create product profiles that bundle specific licenses together, then add users to those profiles. The approach scales efficiently from small teams to large enterprises and makes license management significantly easier as your organization's needs change.

Product profiles serve as containers for application and service licenses. When you add users to a product profile, they gain access to everything in that profile. This model gives you flexibility in organizing and distributing licenses across your organization while maintaining clear visibility into who has access to what.

Understand how product profiles work

Product profiles act as the bridge between your purchased licenses and your users. To assign licenses, you add users to a product profile. Each profile you create can contain licenses for one or more Adobe applications and services.

A user can be a member of multiple product profiles simultaneously. When this happens, the user's final license eligibility becomes the union of all licenses conferred by each product profile. For example, if a user belongs to both a web design product profile that includes Photoshop and a video editing product profile that includes Premiere Pro, that user has access to both Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

This flexibility supports users who perform multiple roles in your organization. Rather than creating increasingly complex product profiles that try to accommodate every possible combination of tools, you can assign users to multiple focused profiles that each serve a specific function.

Design product profiles

The way you structure your product profiles directly impacts how efficiently you can manage licenses over time. Consider organizing product profiles by job functions rather than by organizational structures such as departments or teams.

For example, if everyone in a department needs Photoshop, you might initially create a department-wide product profile. However, if some people in that department are web designers who need Photoshop and Dreamweaver, while others are video editors who need Premiere Pro and After Effects, you'll get better results by creating role-based profiles: one for the web designer role and one for the video editor role.

When you define each product profile, identify these key elements:

• Products: Applications and services available to profile members
• Product profile names: Administrative labels that don't appear in deployment packages
• Services: Capabilities like Adobe Fonts and PDF services you can enable or disable
• Users: Individuals or user groups you add to grant profile licenses

Manage licenses through product profiles

Product profiles simplify license management when users change roles or when your licensing needs evolve. When a user moves from a web design role to a video editing role, you can add them to the video editing product profile and remove them from the web design product profile. This action immediately changes which applications are activated for that user and frees up licenses for reassignment.

Similarly, when a product profile's requirements change, you can update it directly. For example, if your video editors need access to Adobe Premiere Pro, add that license to the video editing product profile. All users in that profile immediately gain access to the newly added application without requiring any additional deployment steps.

Avoid redundant license consumption

A license is consumed each time a user is added to a product profile that contains that license. If a user belongs to two product profiles and both confer a license to the same application, that user consumes two licenses for that application.

To prevent this redundant consumption, carefully design your product profiles to minimize overlap. Identify which applications and services each role-based profile truly needs to fulfill its function. When you find that multiple product profiles require the same application, evaluate whether you can consolidate or restructure them to eliminate duplication.

This planning becomes especially important as your organization scales. The license efficiency you gain by eliminating redundant assignments directly affects your licensing costs and administrative overhead.