Word for Mac 2011 refuses to write to VMware Shared Folder

Question

My main OS is Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit. I'm using VMware Workstation 7.1.4 to run Mac OS X 10.6.8 which is working well.

I'd like to use VMware shared folders to exchange data between the normal OS and the weird OS. My problem is, some Mac applications don't want to write to VMware's shared folder.

For example, Finder and muCommander can both create subfolders there and copy files in both directions. Text Edit can sometimes save text files, but sometimes it complains "The document ... could not be saved". Note that even when it says it can't save, it still creates the "... (Autosaved).txt" file with the latest version of the file, as well as multiple empty folders named "(A Document Being Saved By TextEdit #)"

Microsoft Word 2011 never saves anything, saying: "There has been a network or file permission error. The network connection may be lost."

1. How do I fix VMware shared folders to make them always writable, not sometimes writable?

2. If it's impossible (e.g. due to incompatible file systems), how can I have a single Word document opened on the Mac but saved (Win+S please, no weird methods like using Google Docs instead of Word) on a PC? Perhaps there are macros capable of mounting writable NetBIOS shares, or FTP, or something similar?

Answer 1

You can skip the VMWare shared folders and use SAMBA instead. Create a normal W7 shared folder, which will be exposed to the network, then connect with SAMBA in OS-X. You may need to adjust network settings to get it working ie, bridged adapter, same "domain" name, etc. You can also configure OS-X to be a SAMBA server if that works better for you.