Easily Share Files & Folders On A Domain With Easy Share

Easily Share Files & Folders On A Domain With Easy Share: "
You may often need to share files and folders with other users or computers on the same network. This may not be so much of a task on your home network where you have only a few computers and you might only need to share a folder or two every once in a while. But it quickly becomes quite cumbersome when you are on an office network where you might be required to share files with other users frequently.

Configuring the shares and then permissions for each, the Windows way, might not be the quickest and easiest way as you shall see. You can do it a lot better and easier with Easy Share.



As is the case with most Codeplex downloads, a license agreement pops up just before you download the application. Go through it and you will be able to download Easy Share, if you choose to accept the agreement. The download is relatively small (under 1MB). Once downloaded, install the application and you should be good to go. The only difficulty that can crop up might be due to the unavailability of the .NET framework on your computer, which is required to install and run Easy Share.

Once installed, go ahead and fire it up. You are greeted with a minimalistic UI, which looks like the one below:

The application presents two sections “Share details” and “Permissions“. The former lets you configure the folder and sharing details on the network, whereas the latter can be used to configure who has access to the shared folder on the network. Let’s just share a sample folder and see how easy the entire process is.

• Click on the browse button next to Local Path and browse to the location of the folder you want to share.
• Give it a share name and share description that will help others identify the contents of the folder.

That is all the folder configuration you need to do. Next up is configuring who you want to share the folder with and what permissions they can have.

Contact management and easy permissions is what really makes Easy Share worth the install and bypassing the Windows Sharing and Security configuration. You can easily add contacts with whom you want to share files and folders with simply by using their usernames.

• Click on the manage link to add users to your list.
• Click on the Add button and specify an alias that will help you remember the contact.
• Next you need to provide the domain name followed by the username of the contact on the domain. You can hit the “Check” link to see if the user exists on that domain.

Once you have added the users you want to share with, you will see them listed in the main window. You can then check or uncheck the users you want to share the files with. If you scroll to the right you will also be able to edit the permissions that each of these users have for that folder.

That is all you need to do. The next time you would be able to use the already added contacts, making your job that much easier. You can of course, remove or edit details for the contacts as and when required.

Easy Share is a nice little utility that makes sharing files and folders on the domain a whole lot easier and faster. Once you have your contacts configured, you can easily share folders in a snap with just a few clicks. If your computer is a member of a domain then Easy Share is a useful little application to have.

How do you share your files and folders on the network? Any special tools with similar functionalities that you use for this purpose?

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