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Map SharePoint with local file drive - A complete guide

If you google around you can find quite a few posts talking about this 'simple' solution, but I find none of them gets into deepth, especially on prerequisites. So I write this post and hope it can provide meaningful information for users who need map SharePoint with local file drives. And I will give a short overview and the advantages and comments about this implementation.

 

Prerequisites

You need to make sure the the "WebClient" service is up and runing on your server. If this service is disabled or missing on your server, you will have an error saying "The folder you entered does not appear to be valie. Please choose another"
 
To check if "WebClient" service is in your services list, just open services and see. If it is missing, please follow the steps to make it available:
     
  1. Start the Windows Server Manager.
  2. In the tree view, highlight the Features node.
  3. In the details pane, click Add Features.
  4. In the Add Features Wizard, check the Desktop Experience box, and then click Next.
  5. Click Install.
  6. When the Add Features Wizard has finished, click Close.
  7. Click Yes when promoted to restart the computer.


After that you should be able to see the "WebClient" service is avaliable in your services:
And then you need to start it.

Map SharePoint with file drive

 
  1. Open "Windows Explorer" from your server
  2. Right click on "Computer" icon, select "Map network drive.."
  3. Click "connect to a web site that you can use to store your documents and pictures"
  4. In "specify the location of your website", input the library url where you want to store files (e.g. http://devsp2010tl/sites/dw/Shared%20Documents). Note in lower versions of SharePoint the url can't contain %20 charactors, so simply change the url as http://devsp2010tl/sites/dw/Shared Documents in this case.
  5. Give it a name
  6. Follow the instructure and finish!
After that you will be able to see the folder under your computers:
 

The benifits for using this mapping:

Lots of benifits, such as:
  • You can drag and drop files/folders into the mapped drive and it will be synced to SharePoint library (especially when you are using lower SharePoint versions before SharePoint2013)
  • Manange (adding/updating/changing/deleting) files from either SharePoint or file drive
  • Leverage version control of SharePoint
  • Leverage SharePoint search.
  • Security controls
  • you name it...
For business, one of the real world solution could be:

A business used to use a shared network drive to store company documents such as policies, forms, guides. Using this mapping, business can make the documents and files managable quickly. Meanwhile for file migration, it could also be a good solution.

Enjoy!
 

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