Sharing Drives and Folders

Whether you work on your computer in an office environment or a home environment, you might need to share files with other people on your domain or in your workgroup. Rather than sending copies of files to everyone who might need them, you can place the files on a shared drive or in a shared folder from which other people can access them.

You control which drives and folders on your computer are shared. By default, when you share a drive or a folder, any other user on the network can access the files stored there whenever your computer is turned on. They can see the contents of the drive or folder, open files, save changes, create new files on the drive or in the folder, and delete files from the drive or folder. You can limit access so that only selected people or groups of people can work with the contents, and you can limit the types of access granted to each person or group.

The Windows Vista user profile structure includes a Public user profile folder that contains the Public Documents, Public Downloads, Public Music, Public Pictures, and Public Videos folders. The contents of these shared folders are available to anyone using the computer, meaning that multiple users of the same computer can share files with each other by placing the files in these folders.

In this exercise, you will share a folder on your computer with everyone else on your domain or in your workgroup.

1.	Display your Documents folder. Then browse to the MSP\SBS_WindowsVista subfolder.
2.	In the Content pane, click the Chapter08 folder, and on the toolbar, click Share. The File Sharing wizard starts. [View full size image]
3.	Click the arrow to the right of the empty box, click Everyone, and then click Add. Any person with a user account and password for this computer will now have read-only access to the Chapter08 folder. You can change the access level from Reader to Contributor or Co-owner by clicking the Permission Level arrow and then clicking the type of access you want to allow.
4.	Click Share. Then in the User Account Control dialog box, if you're logged on as an administrator, click Continue. Otherwise, enter an administrator password, and click OK. [View full size image] Restricting Permission to a Shared Folder By default, a shared drive or folder is available to everyone on your network. You can limit access to specific people or groups by removing Everyone from the permitted user list and adding only the people or groups you want. To customize permissions for a shared folder: Open the shared folder's Properties dialog box. On the Sharing tab, click Advanced Sharing. Then in the User Account Control dialog box, if you're logged on as an administrator, click Continue. Otherwise, enter an administrator password, and click OK. In the Advanced Sharing dialog box, select the Share this folder check box, and then click Permissions. In the Permissions dialog box, with Everyone selected, click Remove. Then click Add. In the Select Users or Groups dialog box, enter the Windows user account names or domain user account names of the people you want to have access to the shared folder, and then close the four open dialog boxes.
5.	After the folder is shared, click Done. In the Folders list and Content pane, the folder icon changes to reflect that the folder is shared.