Step 16: Mapping a Sharepoint Web Drive

Earlier in this guide we demonstrated how to upload a document through the SharePoint site interface. Another option for uploading files is to map a SharePoint web drive or directory and use the mapped drive to move files via Windows Explorer or other file manager program from an external location to the SharePoint directory .

To map a web drive to a SharePoint directory:

  • Make sure you are running at least Windows XP; earlier version of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows 98, etc.) do not support web drive mapping.
  • Make sure you can browse to the SharePoint site without any problem; if needed, add the site to IE security zones and configure Firefox for NTLM authentication.
  • Make sure Windows WebClient Service is running. To do so, from the Start Menu, navigate from Start > Settings > Administrative Tools > Services; from the list of services, scroll down to “Webclient” and make sure its status shows it is “Started.”
  • Browse to your SharePoint “Web Application.” In this example, we will use the custom Web Application we created earlier — located at http://gsa.tfplocal.net/xyz/docs/ — and note that we are not navigating to http://gsa.tfplocal.net because the latter URL is for the default SharePoint site, not the custom site used for this example.

    In any event, once there, in the left-side pane, click on the Documents link. You should now be at the Documents page. In this example, you can see there is only the document we uploaded earlier, “litigation”. And note the part of the SharePoint site URL we use later in this step:

  • But for now, on the desktop click on the “My Computer” icon to open Windows Explorer, and from the menu select Tools > Map Network Drive… -
  • Select a drive letter of choice (not otherwise in use by the system); in this example, we will select “S” -
  • Assuming you still have your SharePoint site open in the browser, copy the site URL from the web address field, with the correct path to the Documents directory at the site. In this example, the URL is http://gsa.tfplocal.net/xyz/docs/Documents which is the document directory we will map. Note in this example that we copy over the URL only up to .../Documents and exclude everything after that, namely /Forms/AllItems.aspx because we are only interested in what’s under the Documents directory.

    In the Map Network Drive dialog window, paste the copied URL to the Folder: field; make sure that “Reconnect at logon” is checked then click Finish:

  • Once done, My Computer now displays the newly mapped drive:
  • You can rename the newly mapped drive; in this example, we will rename the “S” drive as “Sharepoint” (clever, huh?) -
  • Now, whenever we click on our “S” drive it will take us to this newly mapped web drive or directory and we can browse all SharePoint content. As shown here, by going to the newly mapped “S” drive, we can see the “litigation.doc” document we uploaded earlier.
  • If you don’t care about adding metadata to one or more files, you can just copy/cut-and-paste your files to the “S” drive exactly the way you would copy/cut-and-paste any file using Windows Explorer or other file manager.
  • However, if you do want to add metadata to an uploaded file, you need to do it one of two ways: Either upload the file directly through the SharePoint site interface (as detailed in the step about adding metadata when uploading documents to the MOSS library); or alternatively upload the document via the “Save as” dialog of any application (e.g., Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc.) that recognizes the SharePoint installation and thereby allows you to save the document to the web drive with a dialog option to add metadata.

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