I have been working with Microsoft Premier support on an issue around performing a mail merge with a Word document and Excel document stored in a SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) team site.

According premier support, they are unable to 100% duplicate my issue. However, I am convinced this is a problem.  I have conducted this test in a number of environments and configurations and always land up with the same result.

So I am going to outline the issue here, and then ask for feedback from the community to see how many others are / are not experiencing it.

Setup

1. Created a default Team Site
2. Created an Excel document with two data fields (First Name and Last Name) and some dummy data that will be used for mail merge.
3. Created a blank Word document

Steps

1. Edit the blank Word Document
2. Click Mailings
3. Click Select Recipients and Use existing list
4. For the filename, type http://sharepointsite and hit enter
5. Navigate to the Excel document, select it, and click Open

I get presented with the following error message:

Other Tests

• I have tried copying the shortcut directly to the document and pasting that in the Use existing list dialog box (i.e.: http://sharepointsite/Shared%20Documents/Data.xlsx) and get the same error message.
• Using UNC to connect to the SharePoint site and then navigate to the file gets the same error message.
• Using UNC directly to the file opens it successfully (i.e.:\\sharepointsite\Shared Documents\Data.xlsx).
• Drive mapped to the UNC works successfully.

Please can anyone else in the SharePoint community confirm or deny that this is also happening to them?

UPDATE 10/24/2007

I worked with a new guy from Microsoft today regarding this issue and apparently mail merge does not support HTTP. He also told me not to expect it to get fixed in Office 2007 and they are going to try getting mail merge over HTTP implemented in the next version (no guarantee's).

I am still working with the gentlemen on another workaround that used to work awhile ago and I will provide an update on that when I know more.

UPDATE 11/1/2007

We reached several dead ends on this issue.  Basically, the only way to do a mail merge with a document stored in a SharePoint site is to either access the file directly via UNC, or through a mapped network drive to the SharePoint site. The engineer told me that he has requested that this be made as an enhancement to a future version of Office.

In previous posts I have discussed the concepts around the MOSS 2007 Membership functionality (see the Office 2007 and User Memberships post). This post talks about the location of the My SharePoint Sites and how it gets populated. Once again, the My SharePoint Sites functionality is new to Office 2007 and requires you establish your My Site prior to it actually functioning.

Location of My SharePoint Sites

The My SharePoint Sites folder gets created by any of the Office 2007 applications. The folder can be found in the following location:

C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\

What populates the My SharePoint Sites folder?

The Office 2007 application suite is responsible for populating this folder. It will populate it based on what member groups you belong to within your SharePoint environment. Office will update this location once a day the first time you launch an Office 2007 application.

You can force an update of this location by deleting the following registry key:

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

If you delete that above key and simply restart one of your Office applications, it will repopulate that folder based on what it thinks you are a member of.

Thanks,

Paul Liebrand