"My SharePoint Sites" missing from Office Save As dialog box

So, another dry and technical work related post today. Again, it's as much for my benefit as anyone else's and I may well have more to say about it later as I come across further problems.

I've been wrestling for some time with SharePoint integration in Office. In my particular set up I'm talking about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS2007) and Office Pro Plus 2007. The issue was that for some people the "My SharePoint Sites" option wasn't showing up in their Save or Save As dialog box from within Word, Excel etc.

As it turns out, there's all kinds of problems that can affect this and pinpointing it can take ages so here's some things you can try.

Make sure the user has a My Site.

If they don't have a My Site, it just doesn't work.

Make sure the user has explicit permissions for every site

This caught me out because I'd added an existing Active Directory group to the Members group for the site and couldn't work out why it wasn't appearing under My SharePoint Sites. They have to explicitly be in the Members Group. Annoying, but that's it.

It doesn't work if they're just an Owner either - they have to be Members.

Try re-populating the My SharePoint Sites folder

This can be a tricky one. To the best of my understanding, the folder checks for membership once a day. If you want to force this you need to delete the registry key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp

And then relaunch an Office App to repopulate it. However, I found that the registry key can be in different places. If it's not there try looking in..

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp
HKCU\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp
HKCU\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp

The AppDataLow variant is for Windows 7 and the 14.0 is if you've got anything from the Office 2010 suite installed. Which leads me on to...

Have you got anything other than Office 2007 installed?

Which is the one that's just caught me out and prompted me to write this post! On some of my machines I've got Project 2010 along with Office 2007. It's not a happy situation with SharePoint at all, but one I'm having to deal with just now. In fact I've had problems in the past with InfoPath 2007 and Project 2010 conflicting, the conclusion to which was pretty much just living with it.

Anyway, in this particular scenario, the LinkPublishingTimestamp and the PersonalSiteURL values were being created under the 14.0 keys rather than 12.0 meaning that office just wasn't seeing anything. To fix it I exported the Portal registry key to my desktop, edited it in Notepad to change the values from 14.0 to 12.0 and then reimported to create the new 12.0 keys. After this, the functionality started working immediately.

A large portion of the credit for eventually fixing this has to go to Paul Liebrand's Weblog for its various posts on My SharePoint Sites which have aided me considerably.