The Common share, which is usually mapped as your K: (it is worth noting that all staff have access to the Common share on all the home servers, but students can only access those on the student servers).
You could use the K: drive that we provide, or a Public Folder in Outlook, but these are open to everyone and your files could be read, modified or deleted by any number of people without warning.
A better way would be to keep your shared files in a folder which you could control access to. Everyone could then work on the same single copy of the file(s). No longer will you be wondering which of several copies is the most up to date. Mailboxes need no longer be cluttered up with several copies of the same document as it is passed back and forth as an email attachment.
The Common share, which is usually mapped as your K: (it is worth noting that all staff have access to the Common share on all the home servers, but students can only access those on the student servers).
The Departments share, which is usually mapped as your I:
The Users share provides an initial connection point for home areas but is not usually mapped directly to a drive letter.
However, it is not necessary to make a folder 'shared' for other people to be able to access it. Although your H: drive derives from the Users share of your home server, it is not itself 'shared'. All that is necessary for people to access files in a folder, is to set the appropriate Security permissions on that folder.
PLEASE DO NOT CREATE ADDITIONAL SHARES ON THE SERVERS.
Administrators is there by default and is necessary for system administration purposes. Please DO NOT REMOVE this as you will prevent the folder being backed up and may cause other problems for us and yourself.
D70_STAFF is a group of users that I have added so that my colleagues in IT can access this folder.
Exchange Super User is not necessary but is there by default as it is an Administrator equivelent.
Mark Dewell is me and should obviously be left alone as removal of this will mean I will no longer be able to access my own folder!
Anne Serf is an individual user that I have added.
The bottom half of the window shows the permissions for the group or user highlighted in the top half.
| Permissions required for common access requirements | Allow these permissions | |||||
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| Allow read and execute programs in a folder. (Useful for distribution of documents / course materials) |
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| Allow add and modify files in a folder. (Useful for team project work) |
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| Allow add files to a folder but not read or modify existing files. (Could be used to allow students to hand in course work electronically) |
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| Allow change permissions on a folder. | |
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You may notice that the 'Allow' boxes are greyed out and can not be changed for some users and groups. This is because these access rights are being inherited from folders above this one. If necessary you could block some of these by ticking boxes in the 'Deny' column, but this can become confusing and it is better to remove the inheritance and set all permission directly on the folder. This can be done using the Advanced button as follows.
The 'Inherit from parent the permission entries that apply to child objects.' box is ticked by default and if unticked will prevent permissions from folders above this one being inherited. If you do untick it, you will see a security warning box prompting you to 'Copy' or 'Remove' permission entries. I strongly recommend you Copy them as you can always change them afterwards, whereas if you remove them you could accidentally remove your own permissions.
The advanced settings will also show permissions in written form rather than a series of tick boxes and where those permission originate from (i.e. not inherited, or which folder they are inherited from).
Hint: You can see a full list of available groups using the ListGroups utility which is available from University Menu - Utilities - Network Admin Utilities.
If you have files that are important to a particular function of the University, or are regulaly updated by several people then you may want to consider placing them in a shared folder under your departmental area (i.e. I: drive) so that they will not be lost if one particular person leaves. (If you do not have access to a suitable folder under your departmental area, please email 'Network Admin' with your request).
By the way, it makes no difference to your personnal disk quota if your files are on the H: drive or the I: drive.
You will of course need to let people know about your shared folder and it is important to ensure that the path you tell them is the absolute path, not a relative path
e.g. I:\d70\data\mysharedfolder would only be of use to people who had an I: drive on the same server as my I: drive. Whereas \\bk-staff1\departments\d70\data\mysharedfolder would work for anyone (assuming I have set appropriate security permissions for them).