How is the link to people’s My Site from Outloook provided?

  • Article

In Lync and Outlook you can hover over a contact to get a popup showing ways to interact with the person. This is what it looks like in our environment:

image

When hovering over the persons name, you should get the option to view the persons profile page, or “My Site”. But in a standard installation, this connection is not enabled, and you will only be able to highlight the name, e.g. as shown here:

image

In an installation with a proper MySite-link, it will look like this when I hover over “Thomas Svensen” in the popup:

Link to My site

And clicking the name will open the person’s MySite in your default browser. Worth noting here is that there is not a direct link to the user’s MySite, instead the My Site that you are connected to, is queried using the email address of the person in question. This can be verified by using Fiddler to show the trace of network calls made.

This link to the user’s MySite is stored in the Registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Server Links\Published\My Site\Profile Site]
"LinkType"=hex(b):00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01
"IsMember"=dword:00000000
"IsPublished"=dword:00000001
"Url"="https://my:80/Person.aspx?user="

I have highlighted “My Site” in the registry path, because this name can be anything. Testing has shown that the first entry listed under “Published” is used, whatever the name is. With SharePoint 2010, the only way we have found to create this link in the registry, is to:

  1. Open some document library
  2. Click “Library tools > Library” in the ribbon
  3. Click “Connect to Office > Add to SharePoint sites”
  4. Click “OK” in the dialog that appears.

image

This procedure is not really something we can instruct all our thousands of users to do, of course. There are some suggestions floating around on the net, saying that the PortalConnect popup that appeared in earlier SharePoint version can be enabled for SP2010, e.g. as described by Stef van Hooijdonk. But applying those registry updates didn’t not change anything for us; neither does it seem to work for others on the SharePoint TechNet forum. The obvious alternative is pushing out the registry update shown above via a GPO – Group Policy Object, but there is no official guidance on this, e.g. in the Office 2010 Group Policy and OCT Settings reference spreadsheet. We are trying to get some guidance, but currently, this is the state of affairs.