Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

shared folder

Synopsis

A folder whose contents are made available for network users.

Description

To make the contents of a folder on the local machine accessible to users on other machines on the network, you must share it. A machine whose dedicated purpose is to host shared folders is usually called a file server, but any Windows 2000 server or workstation can have shared folders created on it. In Windows Explorer and My Computer, shared-folder icons appear as folder icons with a hand holding them.

Just sharing a folder isn’t enough, however; you also need to assign suitable permissions to the folder to control who has access to it and what level of access they have. For folders on FAT or FAT32 volumes, you can use shared-folder permissions to do this, but shared-folder permissions have certain limitations:

• They can only be applied to the folder and its contents as a whole and cannot be applied to individual files within the folder.

• They are not very granular and offer only a limited degree of control over access by users to the folder.

A better way of securing shared folders is to locate them on NTFS volumes. This is because NTFS permissions are more granular than shared-folder permissions. NTFS permissions can also be assigned to individual files within a folder, giving administrators a much greater degree of access control. For more information about both NTFS permissions and shared-folder permissions, see permissions in this chapter.

Planning Shared Folders

When planning which ...