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)