How to Request Access to Creative Cloud

(Instructor/Department Use Only)

Request Creative Cloud for Students License 
(Department/Instructor use only)

Request Creative Cloud Licensing for Cornell Employees
NOTE: For University business/administrative use. Includes student employees.

License Details

Cornell University has an Enterprise Term License (ETLA) for the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps Plan. Cornell staff and faculty with a documented business need may also receive access to the the full Creative Cloud All Apps Plan under individual (Named-User) licensing. Named-User licensing provides you with a personal license allowing you to install and use Creative Cloud on any computer. 

Please note that the ETLA has a maximum number of individuals to whom Cornell may provision a CC All Apps Plan license. CU Software Licensing asks that departments please use their best judgment on business need before asking for a license. 

If you are a technical support provider (TSP) looking for information about deploying Creative Cloud in your department, please see the Creative Cloud for TSPs article.

Please see Cornell's Adobe Licensing FAQ article for answers to specific questions.

What Is Included

The Creative Cloud All Apps plan includes all desktop applications that are part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. This includes Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, and many other applications. The license also includes all Adobe Creative Cloud online collaborative tools and Adobe CC mobile apps, along with 100 GB of Adobe Cloud Storage for your Adobe documents. See Cornell's Adobe Licensing article for a list of all of the Creative Cloud apps included in this plan.

If you only need to edit PDF documents or combine multiple PDFs into a single document, you do not need the All Apps Plan. Instead, you should apply for an Acrobat Pro license.

Eligibility

Cornell Employees

Access to the Creative Cloud All Apps Plan or the Acrobat Pro DC standalone plan can be granted to regular full-time, part-time, temporary, and student employees of Cornell University at the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses. The license may cover external contractors at Cornell who are performing duties similar to those of an employee. The license may also cover employees of four additional Cornell-affiliated institutions: he Boyce Thompson Institute, the USDA Robert W. Holley Center, the ROTC program at Cornell University, an the Paleontol. Continued access to the license is contingent upon employment and may be canceled by the request of the employee's department.

Cornell Students

Registered students at Cornell University with a documented academic need to use Creative Cloud software may be granted access to an instructional-use license on a semester-by-semester basis. All requests must originate from an instructor or Cornell academic department. Continued access to the license is contingent upon student registration, and will expire a few weeks after the end of the semester.

Weill Cornell Medical College

The Weill Cornell Medical College has its own independent agreement with Adobe for Creative Cloud. Weill staff and faculty should check with either their departmental IT staff or with the Weill ITS Department for more information on Creative Cloud at Weill.

Creative Cloud All Apps Plan

Restrictions

The Creative Cloud All Apps Plan for Employees is available for Cornell staff and faculty that have a documented business need for the software. That determination is made by the employee's department. Creative Cloud software can be installed by eligible individual staff and faculty under individual (Named-User) licensing.

The Creative Cloud All Apps Plan for Students is license is available to registered undergraduate and graduate students at Cornell University who are matriculated into a degree program and who have a documented educational need to use the software. The educational need must be directly associated with the student's academic program, such as for a class the requires student use of Creative Cloud software, or for another requirement of their program of study that is not directly related to a class. Each student's Creative Cloud license must be sponsored by an instructor or academic department at Cornell University. The license is contingent upon registration and is automatically removed if and when a student is no longer registered. 

The ETLA also provides a separate small allotment of Creative Cloud for Shared Device Licenses (SDL). Unlike the standard Named-User license, Shared Device Licenses are installed on a specific physical computer located on the Cornell campus and are configured in a manner that anyone can sign in with any Adobe ID (whether Cornell-issued or not). Shared Device Licensing is only authorized  if the software is being used solely for educational use, such as classrooms, instructional labs, and library kiosks. SDL is NOT authorized for research or administrative use. 

Costs and Payment

While CIT does not currently assess individual licensing fees to use Adobe software, Adobe licensing is not free:The University pays Adobe a contracted annual licensing fee based on the number of individual licensees and what product they are licensed for. When we signed the original ETLA back in 2010, the cost of the license was just over $100K, and paid by CIT. CIT receives some reimbursement for department use of Adobe software through IT overhead charges, but those rates have been unchanged since 2010. Between price increases and a steady increase in the number of licensees, the cost of the Adobe license has increase eightfold. While we are not yet assessing access fees to use Adobe software, we are now asking that departments provide the KFS account number that you would use to pay for licensing. We are asking for this information because we expect that we will need to begin to recover the costs from the departments using the software, and this information will help us with financial planning if and when we begin cost recovery. 

Download and Install

Install on a Cornell-owned Computer

To install Creative Cloud software on your Cornell-owned computer, please work with your department's local IT support team. Most personnel at Cornell do not have sufficient access rights to install software without the assistance of their local IT support team.

Install on a Personally-owned Computer

Your Adobe Creative Cloud license also allows you to install the software on computers that are your personal property. You can download the installer from the Adobe website.

You will sign in to Adobe with your Cornell credentials. If given the option, please be sure to choose “Company or School Account.” At sign-in, you will be brought to a Cornell-branded CUWebLogin page with Two-Step Login. Please sign in with your regular NetID and Password.

For detailed instructions for installing and using Adobe Creative Cloud software on your personally-owned computer, please see the User Guide on Adobe's support website.

Troubleshooting

If you receive a “License Expired” error, are prompted to start a trial license, or are prompted to purchase a license, you have most likely signed in to Creative Cloud with the wrong account. Please select Help -> Sign Out, then confirm that you wish to exit all Adobe services. Then, please start Creative Cloud again and follow the instructions to Sign in to Adobe Products with CUWebLogin. 

If you are still unable to use Creative Cloud after signing in with CUWebLogin, please contact CU Software Licensing for assistance.