Office 2007 and My SharePoint Sites
In previous posts I have discussed the concepts around the MOSS 2007 Membership functionality (see the Office 2007 and User Memberships post). This post talks about the location of the My SharePoint Sites and how it gets populated. Once again, the My SharePoint Sites functionality is new to Office 2007 and requires you establish your My Site prior to it actually functioning.
Location of My SharePoint Sites
The My SharePoint Sites folder gets created by any of the Office 2007 applications. The folder can be found in the following location:
C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\
What populates the My SharePoint Sites folder?
The Office 2007 application suite is responsible for populating this folder. It will populate it based on what member groups you belong to within your SharePoint environment. Office will update this location once a day the first time you launch an Office 2007 application.
You can force an update of this location by deleting the following registry key:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp
If you delete that above key and simply restart one of your Office applications, it will repopulate that folder based on what it thinks you are a member of.
Thanks,
Paul Liebrand
Comments
Pingback from Restart One » Blog Archive » Office 2007 and My SharePoint Sites
Time December 1, 2007 at 9:07 pm
[...] Original post by Paul Liebrand’s Weblog [...]
Pingback from SharePoint Security / Permission Levels « Paul Liebrand’s Weblog
Time December 6, 2007 at 6:27 pm
[...] Office 2007 and My SharePoint SitesMOSS 2007 and User Memberships [...]
Comment from Chad Lancour
Time December 10, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Booh-yah! That reg key is critical for testing!!!!
Comment from Robert Truchon
Time February 7, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I was having a problem with three users not being able to save documents from Office 2007 apps to SharePoint. The lists and libraries would not display when the users clicked on shortcuts in the ‘My SharePoint Sites’. The app would try to save the document directly to the site. I deleted the shortcuts and registry key and closed all the Office apps. The next time I opened an Office app the shortcuts repopulated and worked fine. Thanks for the post!
Pingback from My SharePoint Sites and Authentication Popup « Paul Liebrand’s Weblog
Time February 28, 2008 at 8:22 am
[...] In a previous blog post, MOSS 2007 and User Memberships, I explain how the My SharePoint Site gets populated. The check only occurs once a day, unless you clear the registry key (see Office 2007 and My SharePoint Sites.) [...]
Comment from Brian
Time February 5, 2009 at 11:00 am
I have no “LinkPublishingTimestamp” key under “Portal” I only have “Link Providers” which shows our MOSS server and then a published link (that I was testing awhile back).
Brian
Comment from liebrand
Time February 5, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Brian, Are you running Office 2007 and did you set your My Site as your default My Site by clicking the link on your My Site?
Comment from Brian
Time February 5, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Yes, using Office 2007 – each time I go to “My Site” on my Vista PC, it has the option to set it as the default My Site.
Trying to determine if this a Vista issue on this PC, or it may be “confused” – I have another My Site on our test MOSS server.
Going to check my XP machine and see if it has similar problem.
Brian
Comment from Brian
Time February 5, 2009 at 2:33 pm
XP machine has the registry key. Deleted the key and saw it rebuild it repopulated the folder based on my membership.
My main concern I have is that a new document library is not appearing from a site in “My SharePoint” sites.
Would that be the Office crawl intervals that need to be modified (full/incremental) – other blog post mentioned this.
Brian
Comment from liebrand
Time February 5, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Your Vista machine may have a “permission” issue that is prevent the Active X Control from updating the necessary registry settings.
As for your XP machine — remember the document libraries will NOT show up in the “My SharePoint Sites” feature only sites will.
This process is completely dependent on your crawl schedule (incremental or full).
Pingback from SharePoint / Office 2007 and random authentication pop up’s with “My SharePoint Sites” (Memberships) « Paul Liebrand’s Weblog
Time February 6, 2009 at 11:52 am
[...] http://liebrand.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/office-2007-and-my-sharepoint-sites/ [...]
Comment from KW
Time March 13, 2009 at 7:53 am
We do not use My Sites functionality from SharePoint but have MOSS 2007 as our Intranet along with Office 2007. Is there a way to get the SharePoint My Sites functionality (including using audiences) to work without having a My Site?
Thanks
Comment from liebrand
Time March 13, 2009 at 11:24 am
Audiences is independent of My Sites in MOSS. You can configure audiences within the Shared Services Provider Administration section of Central Admin. As for the My SharePoint Sites function — this unfortunately is tied to My Sites. Without it SharePoint will not propagate the information to your client PCs.
Pingback from Office 2007 Feature – “My SharePoint Sites” – Cool but Mysterious – Steve’s blog
Time April 18, 2009 at 8:41 am
[...] [1] http://paulliebrand.com/2007/11/29/office-2007-and-my-sharepoint-sites/ [...]
Comment from Pbrooks
Time May 7, 2009 at 11:28 am
I am having a problem accessing/saving to any sharepoint site from office. When I select “my sharepoint sites” there is nothing listed. When manually entering the url, I get the error message “cannot find the url, please check your typing”.
The weird thing is that I can upload any file to the site or open any file. All registry settings seems correct. When I delete the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp and went back to mysites and set it as default. Everything repopulated, but I am still not able to access sharepoint sites from any office app.
Comment from liebrand
Time May 7, 2009 at 10:45 pm
pbrooks,
You might want to verify that your “WebClient” service is running — if this is not running, it could cause problems like that.
Paul Liebrand
Comment from pbrooks
Time May 8, 2009 at 5:14 am
Webclient is running on the client machine as well as the sharepoint server (w2k3) and I still cannot save.
Comment from liebrand
Time May 8, 2009 at 7:21 am
Are you using HTTPS or HTTP for accessing your SharePoint environment?
Comment from pbrooks
Time May 8, 2009 at 7:37 am
http
Comment from liebrand
Time May 8, 2009 at 7:55 am
Send me an email at mailer@imaxa.com and I’ll see if I can assist you further.
Comment from Rich
Time June 23, 2009 at 6:34 am
I am trying to have a place where we (IT) control the content. We want to publish the links and have nothing else get added. My first attempt was My Network Places. I could clear it, populate it, but even though I used the group policy “Do not add shares of recently opened documents to Network Locations” and then I even added another key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer]”NoRecentDocsNetHood”=dword:00000001)
The end result is still unwanted links popping up in My Network Places.
So now I am trying My Sharepoint Sites. But it appears to have the same autopopulate characteristics. Is there any way to have a few links for the users to their document libraries without having everything they browse to automatically show up?
Comment from Gus Curran
Time July 16, 2009 at 11:57 am
But is there a way to populate those My Sharepoint Sites with sites a person is not a member of? We are using the Member group as the group or the main team- and everyone else goes in Visitors group. But sometimes, an enduser would want a site listed in My Sharepoint Sites, even if they are not a member, because they have been giving read/write access to some of the document libraries.
Comment from sandrar
Time September 10, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
Pingback from imason
Time October 9, 2009 at 12:04 pm
[...] [1] http://paulliebrand.com/2007/11/29/office-2007-and-my-sharepoint-sites/ [...]
Comment from Mleckman
Time August 9, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Paul,
Your path above to the location of the MySharePoint sites is not the same in windows 7. I am having issues with not only the my site icon but the sharepoint sites not populating. Any feedback would be appreciated. I have deleted the REg key too many times to count now. I've also tried resetting the Web folders services.
thanks
Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time August 10, 2010 at 4:24 pm
You might want to download my GetUserPublishLinks utility. This will connect to SharePoint directly via a SharePoint URL and retrieve a listing of URLs SharePoint believes you have access too. Once it has the list, it will attempt to make a web request to each one to determine if it is still valid or not. See this post for more information http://paulliebrand.com/2009/08/25/publishing-links-to-office-2007-without-enabling-my-sites-in-sharepoint/ or you can download the utility from my Skydrive account http://bit.ly/bkvuci.
This utility will at least tell you if you are having a SharePoint problem or a client problem.
Thanks,
Paul