Adobe Captivate 8 and 9 seem to have a odd firewall prompt that is now appearing. On this devices I am not restricting any outbound connections, so the issue is that Adobe is trying to connect to something inbound.
This appears to be a “known issue” within the product, but there is little information on why the connectivity is required or what ports need to be granted access if you set your policies via GPO. The Adobe answer is to “allow the firewall access.” The problem is that they want a rule that requires administrative rights to simply dynamically set whatever they want. Since we restrict administrative rights for all end users, what we need to know is what ports they expect to be opened. Microsoft GPOs do not allow you to simply wildcard a process name, so simply listing the “AdobeCaptivateWS” process will not work.
While I did not find any captivate documentation on what ports were required, I did find something else that worked.
Within the Adobe Captivate install folder is an ini file “AdobeCaptivate.ini“. Set the “UseEdgeInspect” property to 0 and the firewall prompt no longer appears.
While I would prefer to use a GPO policy to allow the firewall, Adobe needs to provide better documentation on what it officially requires. For now, I can use AppSense to modify the .ini file on demand and/or simply update my deployment package to set the option.
