Friday 7 January 2011

SBS 2011 – Remote Web Access (RWW) Shared Folders Upload With Easy File Upload Tool

When we first saw and started to use the Shared Folders access feature in the Remote Web Access portal (formerly Remote Web Workplace or RWW), we did not see it as being too useful except for spot file access.

Today definitely confirms that the Shared Folders feature is indeed useful especially when it comes to getting many large files uploaded onto our network.

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The screenshot above shows a ZIP archive of two ProcessMonitor files that were created a few minutes ago.

One of those files contains the ProcessMonitor results of a successful QuickBooks 2010 open while connected using Remote Assistance while the other contains the ProcessMonitor results of the QB 2011 crash when the user opened it without any remote connections.

Yes, we are _still_ fighting to get QuickBooks 2011 and now QuickBooks 2010 to run at a client’s site:

To get the 65MB file to our own site is now quite simple as we no longer need a third party service or VPN (bandwidth soak) to get the file.

While preparing to upload the file we saw the option to install the Easy File Upload Tool in the portal. So, we clicked the link and installed the ActiveX control that was needed:

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Once we clicked the Install button our Upload page now looked like:

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Now we no longer need to use the cumbersome Browse button method to add each file that we need to upload into the folder.

The folder access feature has become quite important to us because it is so simple to use especially once we have the Easy File Upload Tool installed!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can use the shared folders feature to view docs (e.g. word etc) but is it possible to save them without having to save the doc locally, update it and then upload it back to the shared folder using the upload tool?

I currently get the lovely "word cannot complete the save due to a file permission error" - even for my "admin" user account.

Any help appreciated.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

A,

The Shared Folders tool is merely an upload/download tool only.

There are no live connections allowed with the files listed in the portal tool.

The file must be downloaded, worked on, then uploaded again.

The Companyweb allows for live work on a Word, Excel, and other files but we have found issue with the off standard port and the upload feature in Office 2010.

Thanks,

Philip