Our team recently finished a significant enterprise MOSS farm migration from a  single-server installation to a multi-server farm topology.  Once the new farm was architected and constructed, the migration went as smoothly as it could have, with no major obstacles.  However, as a day or two passed, a few of the end users began to notice a strange occurrence.

This particular client is a heavy user of the My Sites and My Links functionality.  During the migration, we used the User Profile Replication Engine, which is just one component of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit.  This allowed us to migrate user profiles, and more importantly, specific user profile properties.  The primary reason for this was to avoid an SSP migration, which is where the actual “My Links” are stored. 

Once the links were migrated, the “strange occurrence” mentioned earlier began to appear.  “My Links” and “My SharePoint Sites” were correct on the portal, but when utilizing the My SharePoint Sites from a Microsoft Office application, all links were incorrect (pointing to the old, pre-migration server name).

Now, that was a somewhat longwinded way to set the context for the following findings and a solution to this problem if anyone else encounters this during a migration or re-build.

Background:

1) When you first visit your My Site, you will receive a dialog box as seen below:

2) If “Yes” is clicked, the registry key PersonalSiteURL is added on your local computer in the following location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal

3) “My SharePoint Sites” are located in the each user’s registry under the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Server Links\Published\My Site

4) When you open a Microsoft Office application and choose “Save As” or “Open”, the Office application calls a web service which populates the list of “My SharePoint Sites.” 

Note: This web service will only update the list of My SharePoint Sites every hour.  It uses the registry key below to determine when the last update was made.  To force an update to this list, delete the registry key below, and the Office application will re-create this key.

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

Solution:

To correct (re-sync) the links within the local user’s Office application, we opted to allow SharePoint/Office to go through its standard process to ensure that all pieces would be working together as designed.

1) Delete the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\PersonalSiteURL

2) Navigate to your My Site and select “Yes” on the dialog box as seen in Step 1 under the Background section above.

Note: This will also delete the LinkPublishingTimestamp registry key seen in Step 4 above.

3) Verify the PersonalSiteURL registry setting to ensure that it contains the correct My Site URL

4) Open an Office application, select Open, and click on “My SharePoint Sites”

5) The Open list will then be populated with the list of SharePoint sites where you are in the Member group.

Note: Depending on the environment, allow up to 60 seconds for Office to populate this list