How to Share a Folder

Video Transcript

"Hi, Michael Burton, with MichaelBurtonfilms.org in Salt Lake City, Utah. We here talking about using MicroSoft Windows. I want to show you how to share a folder on your network. Let me start off by saying that WindowsXP is a registered trademark of MicroSoft and I am in no way affiliated with MicroSoft. Sharing a folder on your network is very simple. First, lets establish why you want to share a folder. If you go over here to start menu, pull it up, we have an option here called My Network Places, I'm going to go ahead and click on this. This brings up any folders currently on my network right now that are shared, now, technically I have more on my network that are shared than this, lets go ahead and click refresh and see if they pop up. I think it's because I'm running on a different desktop for a demonstration for this video and so it's not showing every single file that I currently have shared with this administrative user. Basically what it's showing right now is that we have our D drive on this computer, which is called office, and then we have my My Documents folder and My Shared Documents folder on this office. Normally it would just be the shared docs on this office computer that are on this network places but I have chosen to share my My Documents, my D folder. I'm going to show you exactly how I did that right now, there's a couple different ways. This is so that you can have access to these files and folders on different computers over your network, if you need to pull different files, music, video, text, whatever off, onto another computer through either wireless or through your Ethernet. One way to share a file is, lets go ahead and go to the start menu, lets chose our My Documents, I know that we already have our My Documents shared but I'm just going to show you how I did it, there's a couple different ways. If we open My Documents folder, on the left hand side, you see an option called share this folder, very simple, go ahead and click on it. This brings up the My Documents property, this is where you're going to set the My Document properties by making a few choices. This actually shows, under local sharing and security, that you want to make this folder private. You don't want anybody to be able to access this folder, that is the opposite of what we're talking about doing. So just go down here, network sharing and security, this gives you the option to share this folder on your network. You would select this option and then it also gives you the ability to change the name of the folder, so instead of it saying My Documents you can change it to a certain shared name, something different to disguise it so that if someone were to get onto your network, they wouldn't know exactly what type of files those were. Also it would show, down here it gives you the option to allow the network users to change the file. I usually end up checking this box just because, if I'm on my laptop and I need to delete something off of my one computer, off of this folder, I can go ahead and delete it from my laptop and I don't have to get on my other computer to do so or I can change the name or I can move files around, it just gives you a little bit more flexibility when wanting to change files on your computer. Then what you would do, is when you're done, you would click apply then click ok and you're all set. You have just shared this folder and it will now show up on your network places or under your work group. Another way to get to this exact properties menu that we have here, lets go ahead and close down the My Documents, is if you click on the start menu and lets say we want to share the My Documents, you can just right click on My Documents, scroll down, click on properties and if you notice in the top left hand corner it gives you three tabs, Target, General and Sharing, sharing is what we want, go ahead and click on it. This brings you to the sharing menu again of the My Documents properties and, again, go through the steps to either share the folder on the network or to allow network users to change the files."