Publishing Microsoft Office Links from SharePoint

Both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 have many integration points with Microsoft Office 2007. For example, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 can synchronize lists for read/write access and Microsoft Office Word 2007 can edit offline documents. As SharePoint use grows, end users find themselves with many sites, libraries, and lists, and keeping tabs on all of them becomes a chore. It's possible to manually create links in My Network Places to SharePoint sites, but maintaining these Network Places is so time-consuming it eventually defeats the original intention of making it easy to locate the sites you most commonly work in.

MOSS, in conjunction with Office 2007 applications, helps ease this pain by automatically maintaining links to various sites and libraries. These links surface in different locations and serve multiple purposes. Some links appear in the file Open and Save dialog boxes, some surface in Outlook for automatic synchronization and offline editing of your personal documents, and others help display a user's public My Site page. By learning how MOSS maintains links and how they find their way into Office applications, you'll provide your users the most bang for their buck and be able to fix things if they go awry.

Publishing links into Office applications is closely related to the My Site features in MOSS, so the information in this article doesn't apply to a WSS implementation. You manage MOSS mostly through the Shared Services Administration site.

Figure 1: Membership information on a My Site. Click to expand.

One of the core pieces of the SharePoint integration jigsaw is MOSS's ability to maintain a list of all the SharePoint sites to which you have access. More specifically, MOSS can list all sites to which you've been granted explicit access through the Members group. MOSS maintains knowledge of the members of team sites and presents this information through a user's My Site, as shown in Figure 1. Membership information surfaces in multiple places: SharePoint Sites on your private page, documents and memberships on your public page, and the My SharePoint Sites section of My Links, which appears on all SharePoint sites if you've enabled it. This membership information gives you one-click access to the team sites that are important to you and lets others who view your public profile see which sites you are both members of.

When your Active Directory (AD) account has been explicitly added to the SharePoint group that represents the members of a particular site, that site appears in all these places. The site's members group gives members the right to contribute to the site. By default, this group is called "sitename Members." It's not commonly known, but you can override this default and designate any group within the site to be the members group. Anyone with owner access can do so via Site Actions/Site Settings/People and Groups/Settings/Set Up Groups.

The requirement that you be a member of a site's Members group for that site to show in your My SharePoint Sites list is important, because there are many other ways users can be granted contributor access to a SharePoint site. For example, owners of team sites have contributor access but don't appear in the Members group, so those team sites don't appear in the owners' My SharePoint Sites lists. In such cases, you might want to add owners explicitly to the Members group. Another example is a security group that you add to the Members group. Although members of the security group are members of the team site, the team site won't appear in the My SharePoint Sites lists of members of the security group.

The My SharePoint Sites list requires your account to have an entry in the SharePoint user profile and be maintained by a background profile synchronization task, which runs hourly by default. You can change the frequency of this task using the sync operation of the Stsadm command-line utility (stsadm.exe). To change the frequency to every 5 minutes, use the command

Stsadm –o sync –synctiming "every 5 minutes between 0 and 59"

Note that it isn't necessary to create a My Site for My SharePoint Sites to appear in the My Links part of any SharePoint page, but as you'll see, you must create a My Site to have links published to Office applications. The My SharePoint Sites links are stored in the Shared Services database in a table called UserMemberships, and any links you manually create via your My Links are stored in the table called UserLinks.