Reference Assembly stored somewhere else

The company I am working for as a shared assembly that they do not want to install in the GAC and do not want to copy it local when they add a reference to the assembly in their apps. So when running the app I obviously get an error the assembly can not be found. So my question is how can I have the app look in the shared location for the assembly?

add a reference to the DLL and set the copy local property of it to false

did that and that does not work.

is it a .net reference? or is it COM?

.NET reference.