In some business environments people end up using the same bookmarks (resources for work, search tools, favorite vendors, etc) but have to maintain their own bookmarks manually.  This is fine but it’s really a waste of time and energy if you have to send an email around letting people know who a new vendor is and to make sure to remember to update their bookmarks accordingly.  Here’s a great workaround that let’s this happen automatically.

If you use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer this walkthrough is useful too.  Firefox doesn’t have a way to share bookmarks automatically, however you can use this trick plus PlainOldFavorites (that we talked about here) to get your bookmarks sync’d in Firefox as well.

Getting the share setup

First, make a folder somewhere on your network (preferably on a server in a shared folder) and find it’s UNC path (generally \\\\)

Once you make this folder copy all the bookmarks from your bookmarks folder into the new folder on the network share. (or just leave it empty and you can start adding bookmarks through Internet Explorer after you’ve finished this walkthrough)

Setting up the workstations

On each computer you want to have access the shared bookmarks do the following:

1. (for windows xp) Click on start, then run and type “regedit” (with no quotes) and hit enter

1. (for windows vista) click on the windows button, then where it says “Start Search” type “regedit” (with no quotes) and hit enter

2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders

3. Find the “Favorites” key on the right hand side and double click on it.  Change the value to the UNC path from above (e.g. \\\\)

4. now find the key on the left called “User Shell Folders” (it’s generally about 15-20 folders down the list on the left) and change the “Favorites” key in it the same way you did in step 3

That’s it!

Restart your computer and when you open Internet Explorer you’ll see all the bookmarks from the shared folder.