At my workplace we use SharePoint as a DMS for one of our applications. We don’t expose the user to the web front-end of SharePoint and they probably don’t know it’s there. As far as they are concerned they double-click a document listed in our app and it just opens – easy as. The document types up to now have all been MS Office - .doc, .xls and .rtf – and Office is deeply integrated with SharePoint. Pass a URL to Word 2007 and it will open the document just fine.
Now, however, we have to support a document type for ApplicationX. ApplicationX is old, cranky and pees on the floor when you’re not looking. It does NOT like URLs – only file paths for ApplicationX. So, rather than have our app pass it a URL to a document we need to pass it a UNC path... Fine, we can open documents in SharePoint with a file path – there’s that Open with Windows Explorer functionality, right?
Right. But we’ve got SharePoint installed on Windows 2008 and that option isn’t available... So how to enable it? SharePoint Central Admin maybe? ONET.xml perhaps? Add some DLLs to the Web Server Extensions hive?
None of the above. What you need to do is install the Windows 2008 Desktop Experience! Server Manager > Features > Add Feature.
This installs the WebDAV redirector, and hey presto! Open with Windows Explorer appears under Actions for Document Libraries. We can now map a drive to SharePoint document libraries or access them via a UNC.
The Desktop Experience also installs Media Player, Windows Calendar, the Aero theme etc. But you wanted that on a server didn’t you..?
P.S. as we were figuring this out we installed the IIS 7.0 WebDAV module – this was the wrong thing to do and just got in the way of SharePoint’s own WebDAV support. Things started working for us when we uninstalled it.
Now, however, we have to support a document type for ApplicationX. ApplicationX is old, cranky and pees on the floor when you’re not looking. It does NOT like URLs – only file paths for ApplicationX. So, rather than have our app pass it a URL to a document we need to pass it a UNC path... Fine, we can open documents in SharePoint with a file path – there’s that Open with Windows Explorer functionality, right?
Right. But we’ve got SharePoint installed on Windows 2008 and that option isn’t available... So how to enable it? SharePoint Central Admin maybe? ONET.xml perhaps? Add some DLLs to the Web Server Extensions hive?
None of the above. What you need to do is install the Windows 2008 Desktop Experience! Server Manager > Features > Add Feature.
This installs the WebDAV redirector, and hey presto! Open with Windows Explorer appears under Actions for Document Libraries. We can now map a drive to SharePoint document libraries or access them via a UNC.
The Desktop Experience also installs Media Player, Windows Calendar, the Aero theme etc. But you wanted that on a server didn’t you..?
P.S. as we were figuring this out we installed the IIS 7.0 WebDAV module – this was the wrong thing to do and just got in the way of SharePoint’s own WebDAV support. Things started working for us when we uninstalled it.
This is a great tip, I had no idea one needed to install Desktop Experience in order to enable this functionality on Windows 2008.
ReplyDeleteOne of the problems is that none of the SharePoint specific functionality is available (versioning, check out, meta data etc.) when accessing documents via the Windows Explorer.
You might be interested in Dosensio Zoom (Dosensio), where we are basically trying to bridge this gap. The product is still in beta but you can download a free version here Community Edition.
Andreas