Say you are converting a free form project (no Ant or any build script) to a Maven managed build. It likely has undocumented and untrackable JAR dependencies that are stored in source control with the application code. Use this style of dependency tags to access the JARs not in Maven Central and only in source control.org.company.untrackable somecore 0.0 system C:\home\group\versioning\team-foundation-server\department\radio\heart\WebContent\WEB-INF\lib\somecore.jar The above configuration is all well and good for compiling with the non-Maven Central JARs. But to package the WAR with the 'system' scoped dependencies the build tag needs the following added to the maven-dependency-plugin section: org.company.untrackable another-service 0.0 system /WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/another-service.jar org.apache.maven.plugins maven-dependency-plugin 2.6 install copy-dependencies /-/WEB-INF/lib