Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

184 9.7 My SharePoints—Navigating Sites, Opening, and Saving items

9.6 InfoPath 2007

InfoPath 2007 integrates with the InfoPath Forms Service, but from a pure

client point of view, you can publish InfoPath forms to a SharePoint forms

library, just as you could with InfoPath 2003. Once you have designed your

form you indicate which SharePoint site you want to publish it to. From

here, you can create a new form library or publish into an existing one. In

either case, the form itself is set as a template on the library, and any number

of fields from the form can be promoted as columns in the form library itself.

This allows for data held inside the form to be viewed by users without hav-

ing to launch InfoPath itself.

9.7 My SharePoints—Navigating Sites, Opening,

and Saving items

To date, there have been a few ways of opening, saving, and navigating items

held in SharePoint libraries; for example, map network drives or type in

URLs to sites via the Open/Save dialogs in Office applications. Not all appli-

cations are SharePoint-aware, so the ease with which you could do this was

really dependent on the underlying application (albeit mapping a network

drive would mask the fact that it was SharePoint in the background and thus

any application could open and save directly to SharePoint). Applications

that are SharePoint-aware allow you to interact with metadata and browse the

content of sites via a WebView integrated into the Open/Save dialogs.

One of the problems users have faced is that they typically have access

to many SharePoint sites and therefore lose track of all the different places in

which they could open or save items. This situation is somewhat relieved in

SharePoint 2007 with the introduction of the My SharePoint Sites location,

which surfaces in the Open/Save dialogs of Office 2007 applications, as

shown in Figure 9.5. This feature allows you to quickly navigate the sites

and libraries that you have access to, making it simpler to open items held in

SharePoint libraries. Not only does the dialog show you the libraries and

lists within a site, but you can also see the subsites and drill down to them.

You will also note a reference to My Site, which lets you navigate your

personal SharePoint site. How are these locations populated? Although these

locations are ultimately held in the registry, they are maintained by the My

Site feature provided by SharePoint Server 2007. The My Site location is set

when you create your My Site (and can be subsequently changed from your

My Site if its URL differs from that stored in the registry; in such cases, you

are offered the option to Set as Default My Site). Ultimately this is held in

the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\

Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces\PersonalSite portion of the registry.