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Think twice before mapping a document library in SharePoint!

Written by sreedwilson | July 23, 2015 9:01:31 PM Z

A common request from customers is to map a SharePoint document library to their PC.  This makes sense for a lot of reasons – but there are some inherent risks with this model.

There is a folder in every SharePoint document library called ‘Forms’.  This folder holds all of the SharePoint views for that document library.  We have seen many instances where end users will mistakenly delete this folder and corrupt their document library.  (See our fix on this post from 2009.)

You will only see the forms folder if you have hidden items enabled in Windows Explorer.

The other issue to keep in mind is that often times these document libraries will not reconnect on reboot.  This is really just a ‘setting the user expectation issue’. While these document libraries may look and feel like network drives – they don’t behave exactly the same!