How to Map a SharePoint Drive on Windows 7
For ease of use, it helps to be able to treat a SharePoint document library as a file folder on your laptop, and from a team productivity perspective, it’s very valuable to have these documents stored there instead of on your local hard disk:
- SharePoint provides versioning and check-in/check-out capability
- It’s accessible from other locations than your machine
- Your fellow team members can see your work in progress if they need to.
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SharePoint is backed up, so you won’t lose anything if your PC gets run over or dies.
To start this process, the simplest thing to do is to browse to the document library (in this case the BLASS shared documents);
Because this is a SharePoint 2010 site, there is an option to open the library in Windows Explorer on the “Library” tab:
Clicking on the “Open with Explorer” button will launch Explorer on your machine. You may be prompted for your user name and password before this happens, but once you’ve logged in, you’ll see the folder:
From here you can do all the normal things that you’d expect with a local drive or mapped network drive. To make this sticky so that you don’t have to go through browsing the site every time you want to do this, you can map the drive to your computer.
Step 1: Clicking into the address bar will show you the actual URL for the library (hit ctrl-C or right click and choose copy to save it to the clipboard):
Step 2: Click on your computer icon in the Navigation pane, which will add the “Map Network Drive” to the menu:
Step 3: either click the “Map network drive” or right click and choose it from the menu:
Step 4: Click the hyperlink to connect to a web drive:
Step 5: Click next to start the wizard:
Step 6: Use “choose a custom network location” and click Next:
Step 7: Enter or paste the URL from the document library you found above and click Next:
Step 8: Give it a name you’ll recognize (defaults to the server name) and click Next
Step 9: You will be prompted with the following screen that means your web folder has been mapped:
From then on, you should be able to find it in the navigation pane of Explorer:
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This is perfect solution thanks for sharing.
You are very welcome …
I was pulling my hair out trying to get this to work, you’re steps made it happen. Thank you.
You are most welcome !
this is great… but one issue. When we open using explorer, it doesn’t show the file as checked out and excel doesn’t show a way to check out (even though the file really is checked out). Is this possible?
Sounds like you want explorer integration with SharePoint, which this really isn’t.
This approach is using the standard WebDAV that SharePoint provides.
It would be a much longer discussion about all the options for check-in / check-out, but for Excel to know the file was checked out, there are some SharePoint integrations that have to happen.
One more update for this solution. I experience it works only until you reboot your pc. What I found is, make sure WebClient service in your client workstation is set to auto-start. One more thing, is authentication issue which described in the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841215
There are two reasons that you might experience losing the mapping when rebooting:
1. The “reconnect at login” isn’t checked when you are on step 4 above.
2. You are on a domain that has disallowed saving authentication by group policy.
Same is also true on the Microsoft Knowledge Base Issue 841215 issue you point out – it is caused by either the OS you are running, a local or group security policy setting.
How or where would i go in gpedit to confirm this group policy?
On Windows, click the Start button, and type “gpedit.msc” to get the group policy editor to show.
I believe the Microsoft Knowledge Base article describes this.
Or, if you’re willing to have the library appear in your favorites menu, you can simply open the library location in Windows Explorer, right-click on Favorites, and select “Add current location to Favorites”.
Good point, thanks for the feedback