Linking to network shares from Sharepoint pages

Question

So the place I work decided to set up a Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 server for task management and I (as the lowly entry-level intern) have been tasked with "figuring it out."
One thing that the end users really, really, really, want is the ability to link to network shares (that are readable by anyone who will be using sharepoint) from a Sharepoint web page. In order to do this, I have edited the HTML manually with several lines that look like the following:
<a href="file://server/share">Server Share</a>

This works (sometimes) but the link reported by Sharepoint is often wrong and editing pages that contain these links will mangle the code such that when I open it, the code no longer looks like what it did when I last hit save (breaking all those links).
Obviously this is not sustainable. I've been told by coworkers that "It worked that way at the last place I worked" but I haven't found out how yet. Any ideas on how this would work or am I barking up the wrong tree? None of the knowledge searches I've done shed any light on the sitataion.
Thanks for any help!
-Russell

P.S. It should be noted that the file option in an href tag ONLY works in IE (which is a real bummer since we mostly use Firefox).

Answer 1

What about using a javascript approach as demonstrated in an unrelated question: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/crmdevelopment/thread/6f76d38a-deda-49f7-8b3d-73e7d264035b

Answer 2

Given that Microsoft is marketing Sharepoint to large enterprises as a REPLACEMENT for file shares, I find this a rather wierd question.

Have you considered getting people to migrate the content of those file shares into the SP repository? Just the added ability to tag files, instead of relying on folders, makes this a win for most companies. And then your file:// problem goes away.

I think that with IE users, you will get better results with URLs that look like this:

\\fileserver\department\oldfiles\detroit

or

F:\accounts\vendors\merriweather

Answer 3

It seems that the only way to do this is to manually modify the HTML on the page (yuck!) and insert links that are formatted as follows:

<a href="file://server/share/">Server Share</a>

The limitation here is that it only works in Internet Explorer due to the security sense that IE lacks and all other browsers have (since linking to a user's local files is potentially a security hazard). The Firefox plugin that attempts to mitigate this security feature din't work for me either.

This additionally means that every time you attempt to edit a page with one of these links in it, there is a chance that SharePoint will bork up the link and break it. This breaking seems inconsistent and varies from deleting parts of the link to attempting to convert it to a server-side reference to deleting the whole thing right out.

It can basically be said that this is not a supported feature and should be used with caution.

Answer 4

Ok, this is easy... stupidly easy. If you simply start typing the path to your share in the form \\ServerName\ShareName\ then SharePoint will automagically convert it into a <a href="file://ServerName/ShareName/">\\ServerName\ShareName\</a> link in the html which (as far as I've seen) won't sporadically break itself (as I mentioned in my recently posted last "answer").

The simplicity of this has both infuriated me and delighted me since I had to test so many different methods to get to this point seeing how there was not documentation as to how it should be done.

Answer 5

Firefox is still a limited browser in SharePoint 2010. For full functionality you need IE7 or 8. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx

For years with using IE6/7/8 with SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0, we instructed people to input UNC path's like this (including quotes) "file://\\servername\share\path including spaces" and it always worked.

Just tested on a task list in SharePoint 2010 with IE 8 on Win 7 and works fine. Firefox doesn't support clicking those links, but adding the link (without typeing the href tag) in firefox does make it clickable and workable in IE.

It's been said many times before, but sadly, if you are running Microsoft web-based corporate apps you get a far superior user expierence with IE. IE for internal, Firefox for web browsing. Good luck.