Browsing SharePoint using WebDav from Windows 2008 January 31, 2009

WebDav is the protocol used by SharePoint to enable Explorer browsing and network mapping of SharePoint libraries.

WebDav is used mainly by the “Explorer View” feature but others are using as well (InfoPath, Excel, Word, PowerPoint).

On the server side there is nothing to install or configure in IIS (no need for enabling IIS WebDav Web Service extension) as SharePoint is implementing its own.

On the client side there is another story, each client needs to be configured differently because Microsoft have decided to change this with each operating System.

Windows XP: There is nothing to do as the Web Client is installed and enabled.

Windows Vista: The Web Folder service needs to be started for it to work.

Windows 2008: The Desktop Experience feature needs to be installed.

 

References:

https://ecommunities.belgium.be/ecomnlsupport/help/_en_US/webdav/wd_clientsonxp_bg.html

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/386/using-the-webdav-redirector/

http://blogs.objectsharp.com/cs/blogs/max/archive/2008/12/18/sharepoint-and-vista-a-problem-with-explorer-view-and-create-list-from-spreadsheet.aspx

Search a Shared Folder over Internet January 27, 2009

I will show you how to setup your SharePoint Search Server Express to search and retrieve your files located on a shared folder inside the network and behind the firewall.

So when we setup search in SharePoint we can use any shared folder as a content source. This work ok if you are inside the network but how to give the same functionality for users outside the company without storing all those files in SharePoint?

First we need to make the files available trough the same IIS web site that is available from outside. For this we create a new Virtual Directory under IIS that points to the shared folder that contains the files. Make sure that you don’t enable directory browsing and leave checked only the Read checkbox. Next on the same screen make sure that you click “Create” button under the Application settings to create a new application name to make this virtual directory accessible. There is no need to give any Execute Permissions as we don’t run anything from there. See screen shoot:

This settings will give us access to the files on the shared  folder over the Internet but only if you know the exact name of the file.

Next step is to configure SharePoint. Under the search settings you should see “Server name mappings” (Search Server > Search Administration > Server name mappings). There is where we are going to tell SharePoint to replace the file://yourserver/share with the link to the Virtual Directory that we previously created in IIS. After adding the new mapping reset the crawl context and start a new full crawl for the content sources.

 

Note: Even if the “Server name mappings” link is under “Queries and Results” it seems that the replacement is done during the indexing process.