Creating a file share with a custom name – an unpleasant Windows 7 user experience

 

I usually run into this issue when I have two folders of the same name that I want to share, but I want sensible share names to distinguish them from one another.

For a concrete example, let’s suppose you have local folders on your PC called c:\project\tools and c:\development\tools (stupid names, I know).  You want to share both of these to the outside world, so you browse to c:\project, right-click the tools subfolder and click Share:

If everything works properly, it auto-assigns a share name of \\yourmachinename\tools.  Congrats.

But now you want to share c:\development\tools, so you follow the same process.  Here is what happens:

The folder is automatically shared as tools2.  Note that there is absolutely no option to choose a different name at this time.  Whether you like it or not, your folder is initially going to be shared as the name tools2.

So, now that it’s shared as tools2, you want to somehow change the share name.  To do this, you need to right-click the folder, navigate to its Sharing properties and click Advanced Sharing… (because apparently renaming a share is an advanced feature).

In the Advanced Sharing dialog, you’ll notice in the Settings group that it displays the current share name and lets you add additional share names.

What you must do is first Add a new share name (you can’t delete the existing one until you do), and give it the name you prefer (in this case, toolsdev).

Now you’ve got two share names for this folder, so delete the extraneous tools2 name.

Now, to make matters worse, if you’ve already assigned permissions to the tools2 share, you’ll have to reassign them.  I’m not sure why this is the case.

Congrats!  You’ve finally created a shared folder of the name you desire, but it took about 5 steps more than it should have.