Where’s Waldo … & My Network Places in Vista!

Here’s the scoop on this issue that I blogged on this past week:

I discovered that a right click into that blank unpopulated area provides a context menu that you can "add shortcut".  With this I then typed in the URL of the SharePoint site.  It provides some of the function I originally sought but is not simple and requires you to retype the file name once you drill down to the document library you are storing the document.

As such I’d say the writing is on the wall to get used to abandoning the My Network Places aka Nethood functionality from the Windows OS, goodbye old useful friend.  Hello mapped network drives.  How many letters are there in the alphabet?  Oh wow that’s kinda limited isn’t it?!

**late breaking news** just discovered in early 2009

See the below picture of how a ’network’ shortcut was added under the Computer object in Explorer.  To begin, I had browsed a photo library in a SBS SharePoint library and a shortcut had automagically appeared.  When I later discovered its existence I got all excited to figure out how it happened and if it could be done on demand.  It can.  Merely right click in the explorer view with Computer selected and the context menu gives you the option of “Add Network Location”.  This runs a wizard.  You will NOT be able to browse into your SharePoint site to get your destination URL.  Instead you should browse there separately and copy the URL to your clipboard.  Unfortunately you’ll notice subfolders such as Forms which in SharePoint are otherwise wisely hidden.