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Robert Koritnik
Asked: 2009-08-12 09:10:42 +0800 CST

Do WebDAV mapped drives work similar as network mapped drives

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I'm trying to share an Excel 2007 Workbook with Sharing capability.

I already tried sharing it over the network from my computer and it worked perfectly. Multiple users were able to open/edit/save it at the same time. Excel took care of merging the data. But. My machine isn't always on, so this is not really a solution.

So I tried WebDAV. I opened an account on www.myDisk.se, and shared my workbook from there. But it works differently:

  1. It only allows one user at a time to have write persmissions
  2. All other users have read-only (with notify) permission
  3. Saving the file isn't always working (file has been disconnected error)
  4. Closing the file doesn't remove the user from the users that use the file...

My question is: Should WebDAV (if installed and configured properly) work similar to regular network share? If it should, I should try some other WebDAV hosting service because myDisk isn't working as intended.

I should point out that I don't know the details and capabilities of WebDAV protocol.

network-share webdav microsoft-excel

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    WebDAV doesn't allow the same kind of file locking mechanisms that a network share allows. Network-share file locking has many different types of locks which can tell other computers that this file is opened by other machines and if oplocks are available (which they are on your share) even allow some communication between the various machines with that file open.

    This rich locking environment is not available with WebDAV. If I'm remembering right, WebDAV has a single LOCK flag which makes it function a lot like how MS-DOS treated locks. It is for this reason that Microsoft made Sharepoint work the way it does, rather than leverage simple WebDAV.

    So no, WebDAV will not work just like a network share.

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