How to enable the Office Source Engine to recognize system environment variables in the Office Delivery sources path when you use Office 2003

By default, the Office Source Engine does not recognize system environment variables in the Office Delivery sources path when you implement a local installation source with Microsoft Office 2003. This article describes a new functionality that enables the Office Source Engine to recognize system environment variables. Additionally, this article discusses how to enable this new functionality.

How to enable the new functionality

To enable the new functionality that enables the Office Source Engine to recognize system environment variables, install the hotfix that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

Usage information

After you enable this new functionality, you can use System Environment Variables in the Office Delivery sources path. The following is an example of a defined system environment variable in the Path registry entry.To change the default Office Delivery sources path or to specify additional redundant source servers for fault tolerance, you can use the Custom Maintenance Wizard.

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Scenario information

The following scenario describes a situation in which you would need this new functionality. You used the local installation source to deploy Office 2003. However, the original source is no longer valid. The following list contains two examples of an original source:

• The network drive mapping.
• The path of a staging server location that was used by the Office Delivery key. This Office Delivery key was used only in the staging environment.

The new functionality lets you use a system environment variable to resolve some of these issues with static delivery source path locations.

Note The first time a system environment variable is defined, the computer typically must be restarted before the new value takes effect.