Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Bible

3.2. Working with Web Folders and Web Clients

While SharePoint Designer provides a smart design and development interface for working with remote Web site content, it's not the only interface that you can use for accessing remote Web site content. Windows itself offers you the infrastructure that allows you to access remote Web site content much like a local folder on your computer. In fact, SharePoint Designer and other Office 2007 programs internally use this infrastructure as a basis for providing their remote-authoring features. A problem in this infrastructure can cause the remote-authoring functionality of these programs to fail. The two main components offered by Windows for facilitating remote authoring are the Web Client service and Web Folders.

3.2.1. Understanding client-side components for remote authoring

The Web Client service (also known as the WebDAV Client Redirector) is a Windows service that allows you to access content in Web sites (that support WebDAV) from a client machine in a Windows Explorer–like interface. With this service enabled and running, you can access a folder inside a Web site in Windows Explorer by using a UNC path (\\webservername\foldername). You can also map network drives to folders inside Web sites. It's a really useful tool for accessing Web content on an intranet where you know the name of the Web server where your Web content resides.

The Web Client service is enabled and running by default on Windows XP and Vista client machines. However, ...