Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

9.8 Accessing SharePoint Document Libraries through OWA 2007 185

Chapter 9

Also, when you do set your My Site location, the personal library within your

site can be automatically added to Outlook for synchronization.

The sites you see in the My SharePoint Sites location are the same sites

available to you from your My Links and SharePoint Sites Web Part, which

we discussed in Chapter 7. The Office File Open/Save dialogs read the details

from the user’s Windows profile at …\Local Settings\Application Data\

Microsoft\Office\My SharePoint Sites, and these details are updated as you

navigate to your SharePoint My Site, assuming any new sites have been dis-

covered by SharePoint. You can also choose to manually add other locations

to this folder; they will appear in the Open/Save dialogs.

Lastly, you can publish links to this location via the SSP. A user’s My Site

is associated with an SSP, and links associated with that SSP can be targeted

at particular audiences. Thus, SSP administrators can create and target spe-

cific links for specific audiences that will ultimately show up in the Office

Open/Save dialogs.

9.8 Accessing SharePoint Document Libraries

through OWA 2007

The last part of this chapter covers the ability to access SharePoint document

libraries through Outlook Web Access 2007. This ability ties in with

Microsoft’s design goal of Anywhere Access, which permeates all of their

offerings. The primary scenario that this functionality targets when using

Figure 9.5

Navigating My

SharePoint Sites.

186 9.8 Accessing SharePoint Document Libraries through OWA 2007

OWA outside your corporate network. This isn’t the only scenario in which it

works, but it is certainly the situation where its value can be most realized.

An example will help explain what I mean here. Consider how often you

have been sent links in e-mail messages to internal documents in SharePoint

sites. Users browse libraries, copy shortcuts, and then paste them into an e-

mail to draw your attention to something. The URL they paste is typically

the internal URL that they were using to browse the library in the first place.

Now this is all very well if you read the e-mail from inside your network and

can resolve and access the internal URL. But what if you are on the road and

using your OWA infrastructure published to the Internet? That internal URL

will not be resolvable from the outside and ends up in user frustration. It also

results in bad working habits in which people attach whole documents to

cater for such scenarios, rather than specifying a link to the source document.

OWA 2007 helps tremendously here by resolving and retrieving those

internal links on your behalf. In other words, OWA can proxy requests to the

internal SharePoint sites as if the actual users were accessing these URLs

directly from inside your network. Thus, the above situation is resolved; no

matter where you may be physically using OWA, you can still access back-

end SharePoint libraries and the items held within.

This same feature can work with file shares. Before you start panicking

about any security issues here, OWA cannot access anything that the user

does not have at least read access to, and OWA will only allow the user read

access to the source item. OWA creates a Kerberos token on behalf of the

user and uses this to access the back-end SharePoint sites and file shares. That

said, if you happen to publish your SharePoint sites via ISA 2006, then ISA

itself will insert a link into the OWA page, enabling the user to launch the

full SharePoint site in all its glory and therefore allowing read/write access.

Remember, this is only possible if you have taken the conscious decision to

publish your SharePoint sites in the first place. Given that OWA allows you

to keep a list of your favorite SharePoint locations in your mailbox, no matter

where you are, OWA can be your vehicle into all your information sources.

Exchange administrators can control whether this functionality is available

and also control which SharePoint sites and file shares are available. In addi-

tion, you can also use Exchange 2007’s WebReady Document Viewing Capa-

bility, which can ensure that only HTML versions of attachments are

available to the end user and mitigates another common security concern of

leaving copies of attachments on unknown devices.

As you can see in Figure 9.6, as users navigate to a SharePoint library via

OWA, they can use the Documents option to view all the documents in that

library along with details of the user last modified the document; they can

also easily look up that user’s details in the Global Address List.

9.8 Accessing SharePoint Document Libraries through OWA 2007 187

Chapter 9

Figure 9.6

Navigating

SharePoint

libraries through

OWA 2007.

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