Sunday, May 2, 2010

Libraries in Windows 7

Although this feature in Windows 7 is very handy in accessing your files easy there are some downsides on this feature when deploying it in your organization.

  1. If you use the Library feature in Windows 7 on remote files/folders, it requires indexing on the file/folder server which is only supported in Windows Server 2008(R2) or on Windows Server 2003 with Desktop Search 4.0. This is because the library feature needs to have a indexed source folder in order to know where your files are located. To have your Windows 7 client do this, will mean that you need to have 24*7 access to these folders and that's usually not the case.What you can do to have it work is to enable offline folder synchronization on the share you will need to access. This will make a offline copy of the share on the Windows 7 client, so that your client can do the indexing on the folder. Unfortunately this means that you will need a time to time replication to your share on your NAS device.In my understanding i have never seen a third party NAS device with CIFS sharing that can index on your file/folders and have Windows understand it.

  2. The library feature is not deploy-able via a GPO. This makes the Central Management of Libraries in Windows 7 a hard one. The philosophy behind Libraries i think is that it's a user feature. If users know what the advantages of properly set libraries are, they will need to create and manage them there own.

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