Windows 7 Libraries


I've been playing around with libraries, which I really like the idea and implementation of, except one of the requirements is that you can only add folders that are indexed. Which means that network shares cant be added.

The official solution in the windows 7 help is to index the network location, and the best way of doing that is to make the folder available offline, as offline files are also auto-indexed. This presented a problem for me implementing this on a business network with a ~400GB network share.

I found 2 solutions:

The first is using this Windows 7 Library Tool. It seems that the ability to add un-indexed UNC paths is available, but only from command line, this tool gives a GUI to implement it.

The other solution (which is the best in my opinion) is to install Windows Search 4.0 on the server, and index the files that are shared. After doing this, users were instantly able to use the 'include in library' button for any of the network folders.

It would seem then that if you have a network share hosted on a windows 7 or Vista PC or Server 2008??, where the files are indexed, then they would be available for adding into a library no problems