Introducing Connected Enterprise: Helping enterprise users access Adobe products and services more seamlessly

Adobe is introducing Connected Enterprise, which consolidates multiple organization-specific profiles into a single unified profile for participating enterprise customers. As this transition rolls out, developers who build Adobe Express add-ons or Creative Cloud desktop plugins (UXP or CEP) may need to prepare for changes in how enterprise users are identified.

This post will help you understand what’s changing, whether your integration may be affected, and what you need to do to prepare.

This is the first in a two-part series. Here, we focus on Adobe Express add-ons and the new API available to support this transition. In a follow-up post, we’ll cover the corresponding desktop APIs for UXP and CEP/ExtendScript plugins.

What is Connected Enterprise?

Today, enterprise users can belong to multiple organizations and may have multiple Adobe profiles associated with those organizations. Connected Enterprise unifies that experience, giving enterprise users a more consistent identity across their connected organizations and Adobe products and services.

For participating enterprises, this means:

The organizations themselves are not changing. They will continue to be used for administration, entitlement management, publishing, and ownership.

Find more information on our help page about unifying identity and storage with Connected Enterprise.

Whose profiles are changing?

Short answer: enterprise users.

Connected Enterprise affects users of participating enterprise organizations. The transition will happen gradually over time, so not all enterprise users will move to the new identity experience at once.

Users with personal Adobe accounts are generally not expected to be affected.

If you build an Adobe Express add-on or Creative Cloud desktop plugin, the important thing to know is that this change affects the enterprise users who use your add-on or plugin — not your developer profile.

Why does this matter for your code?

If your Adobe Express add-on or Creative Cloud desktop plugin relies on uniquely identifying users, Connected Enterprise may affect your integration.

Historically, a single enterprise user could have multiple profiles across different organizations, with each profile represented by a unique ID. Add-on and plugin SDKs exposed these profile-specific IDs through their user ID APIs, meaning the same person could be represented by multiple user IDs.

With Connected Enterprise, these profiles can be consolidated into a single, unified profile with a new ID. For users whose profiles are consolidated, the user ID API will return this new ID rather than one of the IDs previously associated with their individual enterprise profiles.

This matters if your add-on or plugin uses user IDs for purposes such as:

If you support enterprise customers and rely on user IDs for scenarios like these, you should review your implementation and prepare for this transition.

To help you navigate this change, Adobe is introducing new APIs designed to help you maintain continuity as enterprise users transition to their new identities.

Adobe Express add-on developers

For Adobe Express add-ons, the first set of Connected Enterprise developer APIs is already available.

If your add-on uses the existing userId() API, review the new identity() API that maps the new ID to all previous IDs.

For implementation details, see the Adobe Express Add-on API guide and documentation.

Creative Cloud desktop plugin developers

Connected Enterprise will also bring corresponding API updates for Creative Cloud desktop plugins.

These APIs are not yet available, but they will be released shortly for both UXP and CEP/ExtendScript developers.

We will share additional guidance and API documentation when the desktop APIs are released.

Next steps

If your Adobe Express add-on or Creative Cloud desktop plugin serves enterprise customers, now is a good time to understand where your implementation identifies or tracks unique users and prepare for the Connected Enterprise transition.

We recommend that you:

Connected Enterprise is designed to provide a more seamless experience for enterprise users across Adobe products. Taking these steps now will help ensure that your add-on or plugin continues to recognize and support enterprise users as they transition.