Today my customer presented me with this simple question. They had a whole bunch of shortcuts in their “My Network Places” folder but they hadn’t created them. The shortcuts were being created automatically somehow, but just what action was trigging this behavior was not obvious.
After a quick bit of investigation, I found the following article which is a bit dated, but which describes this automatic shortcut creation behavior: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/win2k_980918.asp
After a little more digging, I found references to the “NoRecentDocsNetHood” registry value in this KB article: Policy settings for the Start menu in Windows XP (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/292504) which states:
Policy:Do not add shares of recently used documents to Network Places
Description:Remote shared folders are not added to Network Places whenever
you open a document in the shared folder.
Registry Value:"NoRecentDocsNetHood"
Armed with the above clues and context, I conducted some experiments accessing files stored in remote shared folders. Note that all of the results I document here were observed on a Windows XP SP2 client machine with Office 2007 SP2 installed. Here is what I observed: A shortcut gets created when you directly open any file via a UNC folder view. The specific steps are as follows:
a. Navigate to the UNC path of a site’s document library:
b. Start, Run, enter the folder UNC path (e.g.: "\\<someserver>\<somefileshare>\<somefolder>\<somenestedfolder>")
c. Double-click on a file to open it in the application associated with the file type.
d. A shortcut pointing to the UNC path of the file share is created. (In other words, the UNC path will be \\<someserver>\<somefileshare>
Incidentally, further experimentation showed that if you happen to manually delete the automatically created shortcut while the application is still open, you will find that it will be automatically recreated if you invoke “Save As…” and save a new file in the same location as the original. The interaction with the “Save As…” dialog box will become more important later…
The customer’s situation was a bit different though – the users in this case were not directly navigating to the paths in Windows Explorer. And the automatically created shortcuts did not point to UNC paths, but rather to URL paths pointing to document libraries throughout various SharePoint sites they had access too. But there was no rhyme or reason as to which sites had short cuts and which did not. And in some cases there were multiple shortcuts pointing to the different locations within the same SharePoint site. So, back to more experiments…
Automatic addition of SharePoint document library shortcuts to “My Network Places”
Based on my observations, here are the activities that trigger SharePoint document library shortcuts to automatically be added to “My Network Places” are as follows:
1. Invoke “Save As…” on an Office document type that was opened directly from a SharePoint document library. The specific steps are as follows: (note: you do not need to actually save a file – the shortcut gets created at the point when the “Save As…” dialog opens.)
a. Navigate to a SharePoint site’s document library: http://<somewebapp>/sites/<somestie>/Shared%20Documents
b. Click on the name of a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document to open it.
c. Click on the Office menu, choose “Save As…”
d. A shortcut pointing to the HTTP: path of the document library is created.
2. Invoke “Save As…” and save a non-Office document that was opened directly from a SharePoint document library. The specific steps are as follows: (note: in this case, you must actually save a new file before the shortcut gets created.)
a. Navigate to a SharePoint site’s document library: http://<somewebapp>/sites/<somestie>/Shared%20Documents
b. Click on the name of a text file to open for edit in Notepad.
c. Click on File, Save As…, and save a new file in the same location as the original.
d. A shortcut pointing to the UNC path of the site root location of the site of the document library is created. (In other words, the UNC path will be “\\<somewebapp>\sites” - which is a mostly useless shortcut because no user should have permission to store or see anything at this location.)
3. When you directly open a non-Office file via a UNC folder view. The specific steps are as follows:
a. Navigate to the UNC path of a site’s document library: Start > Run > enter the folder UNC path (e.g.: "\\<somewebapp>\sites\<somesite>\Shared Documents")
b. Double-click on a text file to open it in Notepad.
c. A shortcut pointing to the UNC path of the site root location of the site of the document library is created. (In other words, the UNC path will be “\\<somewebapp>\sites” - this is a useless shortcut in most cases, btw, because most users would not have permission to store or see anything at this location.)
As you can see – things are different when Office client applications are involved. I believe that the underlying reason is because they kick over to use WebDav for interactions with SharePoint so long ast the WebClient service is running on the client workstation.
Hopefully this information will be helpful for some folks out there.