Can a K-12 organization admin acquire/deploy a paid Exchange plugin? (Exchange blocked for K-12 by policy)

Plugin Marketplace
,
1

I’m the developer of Sidekick for InDesign, a paid UXP plugin on Adobe Exchange.

A customer at a K-12 school would like to use the plugin under his school’s Adobe account, but Exchange is blocked for his organization — he sees “Plugin acquisition is not available for your user type”, and Adobe support confirmed to him this is expected behavior for K-12/EDU organizations for compliance reasons. From @erin.finnegan’s posts in the December “Access Restricted” thread, I understand the restriction is intentional for K-12 and was rolled back only for higher education.

My question is about the supported path forward, if any:

  1. Can a K-12 organization’s administrator still acquire and deploy a paid Exchange plugin centrally — e.g. via the Admin Console’s plugin selection during package creation, or via UPIA? Or does the K-12 restriction also cover admin-side acquisition?
  2. If not, is there any other supported route for a K-12 organization to purchase and install a paid Exchange plugin?
  3. If the answer is simply “not currently possible,” that’s fine — I’d just like to give schools an accurate answer instead of a workaround hunt.

To be clear: I’m not trying to circumvent the compliance restriction — I’d like to document the sanctioned path (if one exists) for education customers.

2

I’m glad you raised this issue - I’m moving it to the “Marketplace” category.

More guidance is needed on the HelpX pages about this new restriction.

As you’ve pointed out, admins can included plugins in deployment packages: https://helpx.adobe.com/business/enterprise/deploy-apps-and-updates/customize-packages/manage-extensions.html

I seem to recall this doesn’t work for paid plugins from the Exchange the last I checked. Free plugins work, but how would the licensing work for Enterprise seats? You would, as you’ve mentioned, need to have the plugin package from outside of the Exchange and then use UPIA to install. As far as I know, that still works.