Integrating with 2007 Microsoft Office System Clients

To better integrate your users' activities with SharePoint into their desktop environment, you can customize the Open and Save dialog boxes in 2007 Microsoft Office system to point to document libraries on the server. Doing so adds sites to the My Places bar next to the Open and Save dialog boxes so that users can easily select locations without having to enter URLs to SharePoint sites or go to the site to upload documents.

You make new site locations available to users through a SharePoint Server 2007 Web service that provides a list of sites targeted to a specific set of users based on their roles or site membership. Applications in 2007 Microsoft Office system can automatically discover the Web service through the user's My SharePoint Sites. The new locations then appear as new entries in the My Places bar in the Open and Save dialog boxes.

Administrators can use Group Policy and a Microsoft Active Directory directory service template provided in the 2007 Microsoft Office system Resource Kit to set registry keys on the client that will add specific sites to the My Places bar. You can install and configure the My Places settings through the following steps:

1. Start the Group Policy Object Editor on the domain controller.

2. Expand the User Configuration object.

3. Right-click Administrative Templates, and then click Add/Remove Templates.

4. Click the Add button.

5. Browse to the Office12.adm file, and then click Open.

6. Click Close to exit the Add/Remove Templates dialog.

7. Expand the "Microsoft Office 2007 system" folder.

8. Expand the "File Open/Save dialog box" folder and click Places Bar Locations.

9. Double-click Places Bar Location 1 in the right-hand pane.

10. Click Enabled and enter the Name to display in the My Places bar along with the URL Path to the document library you want to publish to users.

As an additional means to get users to save files on the server, you can use Group Policy settings to limit the locations that organization members can save to using the Save dialog box. For example, you can restrict the ability to save files to desktops and force users to save content in a document library. Limiting where users are allowed to browse to save their documents is one way to encourage users to use server-side locations rather than their local hard drives. The Group Policy settings for 2007 Microsoft Office system will even let you target the limitations to one or more Microsoft Office applications. For example, you can restrict Save locations in Excel 2007 while allowing other Microsoft Office applications to save elsewhere. To configure these settings, follow the steps above to install the Office12.adm template and navigate to the Restricted Browsing folder under File Open/Save dialog box. First, edit the Activate Restricted Browsing setting to enable browsing restrictions for any or all 2007 Microsoft Office system applications. Next, edit the Approve Locations setting to specify the list of locations that will be available in the Save As dialog box.