In Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007, it is possible to create targeted Save Locations for users throughout your organization. These targeted save locations appear under the “My SharePoint Sites” tab when you try to save any documents from within any of the Office 2007 clients.

This can be a very useful tool for your users in combination with clever “Audience” configurations. It will only display relevant SharePoint save locations instead of the huge list of network paths that are usually listed under “My Network Places.”

The first thing you’ll need to do is to configure your “Audiences.”

1. Go to your SSP (Shared Services Provider) and click on the Audiences link.

2. Click on “Create audience”

3. Give it a name, description, and owner. The last setting which is “Include users who: ” will really depend on your organization and how you want to define your audiences. That’ll just take a couple of rounds of trial and error, then you should be able to figure a pattern to use.

4. Click Ok to go to the next page. This page should let you add rules that will determine who is included in your Audience.

You’ll also have to play with these rules a little bit to figure out what works for you.

5. Click Ok and you’ll be sent to the properties page for the specific Audience you just created. To test to see if your Audience was configured correctly, click on the “Compile audience” link. SharePoint will query your user profile database and depending on the rules you’ve set, it will import those users into your Audience. At the bottom you can also add more rules if you’d like to better filter your Audience.

That’s it for configuring Audiences. Note that these audiences can also be used for webparts and views throughout your portal as well. The following steps will show you how to use these Audiences to create targeted links that will show up in the Office 2007 clients as a save location.

6. From the SSP, Under User Profiles and My Sites, Click on “Published links to Office client applications”

7. Click New.

8. Fill out the fields as required. For the “Target Audience” you should be given a list of available audiences if you click on the address book. The one you created previously should automatically show up there. Hit Ok and voila! That’s all you need to do.

After some predetermined timer job or schedule, something I haven’t been able to figure out yet, the links will be available to the Office 2007 clients.

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SharePoint

March 12, 2007

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