Troubleshooting Explorer View in Sharepoint 2003
One of the handy features of Team System is the "free" Sharepoint Services 2003 web site that is automatically created for each Team Project.
The document libraries within Sharepoint 2003 have this cool "Explorer View" feature, which lets you drag and drop files directly into the document library, and otherwise treat the document library like just another folder on your local PC hard drive. You can see "Explorer View" on the left hand side menu of this Demo document library I set up.
Unfortunately, when I clicked on Explorer View, I got this error:
Cannot find 'file://\\teamsystem01.company.net\sites\demo\demo'. Make sure the path or Internet address is correct.
Here's a screenshot of the error immediately after clicking on "Explorer View":
I found a solution to this problem in this helpful blog entry.
Make sure the WebClient service is started, as documented in this Microsoft TechNet entry. The WebClient service (and under the covers, WebDAV) is what drives the Explorer View in Sharepoint.
Once I enabled the WebClient service, I was able to drag and drop files into (and around within) the document library Explorer View as expected. It's much more convenient than the typical upload/download cycle of traditional web applications.