If you work in any kind of environment where there are multiple users, chances are you will need to share one or more folders with your colleagues. For many administrators, this is a very uncomplicated task. For some, nonetheless, this task seems to exist rather elusive. And what happens when you want to give your end users the ability to share the necessary folders to everyone? Are y'all going to walk through the sometimes complicated chore of binder sharing? Or what about training your junior admins on the art of folder sharing?

For those end users (or fifty-fifty for some administrators with less knowledge of such tasks), there is a very easy-to-use Microsoft Windows Sorcerer for sharing folders. This wizard is the Shared Binder Magician, and it is included in Windows XP Pro, Vista, and Windows 7. This wizard makes the procedure of sharing folders incredibly easy — for any level of user.

In this How Do I blog postal service, I will walk you through a very simple wizard that will, in turn, allow yous to prove your end users (or junior admins) a fast and like shooting fish in a barrel way to share folders (or just make your job a little chip easier). In the finish, regardless of your reasons for using this wizard, binder sharing will be fabricated all the more easy.

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Step 1: Open the Magician

Open Shared Folder Magician by opening the Run dialog box and then typing shrpubw.exe in the resulting window. Or you could click Start | Run and and so enter shrpubw.exe in the Run dialog box. In Windows 7, y'all can simply type shrpubw in the Search box and press [Enter].

Step ii: Click through the welcome page

If you need to larn more than about your Windows firewall, you can click the link. Otherwise click Next to continue, every bit shown in Effigy A.

Figure A

This is your standard Welcome screen, where you simply click Adjacent to get to the real piece of work.

Footstep 3: Gear up up your folder

In this stride, you are going to name your share. You lot also can name (or rename) your PC. You should probably get out your calculator proper noun as is, since changing this here could cause conflicts with your computer proper name equally defined by the organization. You volition demand to set upwardly the folder to be shared past clicking the Browse button (Figure B). In one case the new window opens, navigate to the binder you want to share and click OK and then click Adjacent.

Figure B

If you want to share a new folder, you can click the Make New Folder button in the navigation window that appears.

Footstep 4: Naming your share

In the side by side window (Effigy C), you lot demand to first give your share a name and (optionally) a description. The share path is already configured from the previous screen.

Figure C

The clarification volition be an informative clarification so that users know what is in the folder.

Step 5: Offline settings

In this same window (Effigy D), y'all can click the Change button to brand changes to the offline settings. This allows you lot to requite offline access to users.

Figure D

If you do utilise the last option, you lot might want to check Optimize for Performance or yous will experience a noticeable striking on performance should the offline sync occur at the wrong time or a user need a big amount of files/folders to exist synchronized.

A note on offline storage — this tin can exist a potential security issue when secure files are buried on a nonsecure car. Please make certain you enable this choice with care. Once you lot have finished with this, click Adjacent to keep.

Step 6: Permissions

In the next window, you set up permissions for users. You lot have four options (Figure Due east):

  • All users have read-but access,
  • Administrators have total access; other users accept read-only access,
  • Administrators accept full access; other users take no access, or
  • Customize permissions

Figure E

In order to requite all users read/write access, you lot volition accept to utilize Custom.

When yous've established permissions how y'all want them, click Finish.

Step 7: Complete the share

In the concluding screen (Figure F), you have the option to complete this share and/or start over to fix another share.

Figure F

If you exercise not demand to set up some other share, just click Finish and the share volition immediately exist bachelor to all users.

Final thoughts

Y'all should now accept a shared binder ready for your other users to admission. I'thou always surprised that this tool is more readily accessible by the user. But fifty-fifty though Microsoft has seen to information technology to obfuscate this tool from the user, it is however readily available to make sharing folders equally easy as just about whatsoever other chore in Windows.

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