Ting Li talks about Azure, SharePoint and .NET

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:   Start the Windows Server Manager . In the tree view, highlight the Features node. In the details pane, click Add Features . In the Add Features Wizard ,...

A team member asked me why in some situation we need to use SharePoint search on local file drive as we can do 'search' directly on the folder in windows. I think it is necessary to do some research to show why and why the benifit is to do this. And more importantly - HOW.   WHY? If you've played around with SharePoint local file search the answer is straight-forward: You can let it search multiple local file drives, but using windows you can hardly do this. SharePoint can search 'into' the real content even the keyword is in content of files in zip file . See the comparison I did a search for keyword 'issue':   Window built-in search: SharePoint search: SharePoint search can easily filter the result by type/date etc. SharePoint can show a bit of content from the files found to give a bit more indication. ... HOW  It's hard to find a step-by-step guide talking about how to make it work. That's why here I am:-)   Go to the f...