Publishing Links to Office 2007 without enabling My Sites in SharePoint
Some organizations want to leverage the publish links to Office 2007 client feature that SharePoint 2007 offers without enabling My Sites. The publish links to Office 2007 relies on the same update mechanism that the My SharePoint Sites feature uses.
If you have read any of my posts in the past on this topic you know that these features were designed around the fact that users would have My Sites. In fact, the very action of setting your default My Site is what triggers these features to become active.
Is is very possible to use these features without enabling My Sites but it will require you to update some registry settings on your client PC’s. Most organizations will deploy these types of settings using a GPO.
The registry setting you want to add can be found under:
HK_CurrentUser\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal
Add a string value called PersonalSiteURL and point it to any root SharePoint site in your farm that all your users have access too. Normally the users My Site URL would be listed here.
Once you have populated this registry setting, you should start seeing your published links appear once the user attempts to access My SharePoint Sites the first time via an Office 2007 application.
I also developed a utility that you can run, specify your SharePoint URL, and it will return all the URL’s it believes your client PC should get published. For example:
You can download this utility from here:
GetUserPublishedLinks (via Skydrive)
Comments
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Time August 26, 2009 at 7:12 am
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Comment from Martin
Time September 2, 2009 at 7:52 am
Hi Paul,
The download link for the Publishing Links is not available.
Looks good though!
Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time September 2, 2009 at 8:52 am
Martin,
Thanks for bringing the broken link to my attention. I went ahead and resolved it.
Thank you,
Paul Liebrand
Comment from Sara
Time May 7, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Is there any way to change this value without directly editing the Registry? We had a POC SharePoint site set up and I created a “My Site” which automatically created this PersonalSiteURL. Since that time we have moved into a Production environment and I would like this URL to be updated to the new PROD server. Thoughts?
Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time May 7, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Unfortunately not — this registry value is what controls it. You could write a script or utility that you can run on each PC to update it or perhaps update it via a GPO.
Comment from Hector
Time August 26, 2010 at 2:25 am
Paul, I have a related issue. I am trying to get the SharePoint Sites icon to show up in Windows Explorer on a Windows 7 machine running Office 2010, but the “Set as default my site” option does not appear on the sharepoint MySite. It briefly shows up when I go to My Site, but immediately disappears. Do you have an idea of what could be happening. Funny thing is the first time I set this up, it worked perfectly, but I had to change my hardrive this week and I can’t get this to work now. Thanks. Hector.
Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time August 31, 2010 at 2:53 am
Hector,
The “Set as default My Site” is determined by two factors – if the PersonalSiteUrl is set in the registry and if the www home page is set on your Active Directory container. Attempt to clear one or both of these and see if the option comes back.
Thanks,
Paul