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I'm trying to share an Excel 2007 Workbook with Sharing capability.

I already tried sharing it over the network from my computer and it worked perfectly. Multiple users were able to open/edit/save it at the same time. Excel took care of merging the data. But. My machine isn't always on, so this is not really a solution.

So I tried WebDAV. I opened an account on www.myDisk.se, and shared my workbook from there. But it works differently:

  1. It only allows one user at a time to have write persmissions
  2. All other users have read-only (with notify) permission
  3. Saving the file isn't always working (file has been disconnected error)
  4. Closing the file doesn't remove the user from the users that use the file...

My question is: Should WebDAV (if installed and configured properly) work similar to regular network share? If it should, I should try some other WebDAV hosting service because myDisk isn't working as intended.

I should point out that I don't know the details and capabilities of WebDAV protocol.

Robert Koritnik
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1 Answers1

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WebDAV doesn't allow the same kind of file locking mechanisms that a network share allows. Network-share file locking has many different types of locks which can tell other computers that this file is opened by other machines and if oplocks are available (which they are on your share) even allow some communication between the various machines with that file open.

This rich locking environment is not available with WebDAV. If I'm remembering right, WebDAV has a single LOCK flag which makes it function a lot like how MS-DOS treated locks. It is for this reason that Microsoft made Sharepoint work the way it does, rather than leverage simple WebDAV.

So no, WebDAV will not work just like a network share.

sysadmin1138
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  • so is it possible to upload Excel Workbook on sharepoint and use similar capabilities as with network shares? – Robert Koritnik Aug 11 '09 at 17:24
  • @robert It doesn't look like it. Looks like network-share is the only way to accomplish what you want. Microsoft may add this in for later Excel/Sharepoint versions. – sysadmin1138 Aug 11 '09 at 18:04
  • referring to your "It is for this reason that Microsoft made Sharepoint work the way it does" statment: what did you mean by this? Because if it doesn't support this kind of functionality, what is it better than WebDAV then? – Robert Koritnik Aug 11 '09 at 23:00
  • Microsoft chose to not use the WebDAV standard in SharePoint because it allowed them more flexibility. Right now, nothing is better than WebDAV. In the future, this will probably change as MS integrates some kind of WebAPI features into Excel/SharePoint to allow such community editing. It isn't there yet. – sysadmin1138 Aug 11 '09 at 23:09
  • Thanks mate. Doesn't solve my problems, but you still provided all the info I needed. – Robert Koritnik Aug 11 '09 at 23:51