Distribution on legacy clients

Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

On older clients such as Windows XP, the new rights policy template distribution pipeline is not available. For these AD RMS clients you can manually distribute the rights policy templates from a central location to the client. Some distribution methods include using Systems Management Server (SMS) / System Center Configuration Manager Group Policy, or manually copying the templates to the client computer through scripts.

For any template distribution mechanism that will gather the template files from one central location you must configure an export location for the rights policy templates. The rights policy templates exported to this shared folder must be copied to the folder specified in the AdminTemplatePath registry entry.

   HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\DRM
        REG_EXPAND_SZ: AdminTemplatePath
        Value: <path to your AD RMS templates>

See the Office Registry Settings section earlier in this document for additional information.

Note that XPS viewer requires that you set a registry key in order to display the templates. You will need to define the following registry key for use of rights templates with XPS:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\XPSViewer\Common\DRM
     REG_SZ: AdminTemplatePath
     Value: <path to templates>

See the XPS Registry Settings section earlier in this document for additional information.

Notice that the XPS path needs to use a REG_SZ path which means that you cannot use an environment variable and must create a separate path to store the template.