Web Sharing option in Windows 7 ?

Randy & Mike:

I am not making any commentaries on your intentions or the fact that you are trying to help as you both seem to think that I am. Please try to separate a criticism of one particular thing with a criticism of the entire forum and all those that participate, as there is nothing in any of my posts to suggest this. But, for you and Mike to respond with, essentially: "We try hard to help those who need it." does not mean that posting incorrect information is ok.

But Randy, when you say "No one purports to make any claim to having a definitive reply.", you are quite mistaken.

"Sharing Windows resources has nothing to do with running a web server."

is a definitive reply. To those who know what the question is about and what the answer is, this incorrect definitive reply conveys that Mike is unfamiliar with the question being posed, but would rather post a reply as if he was. It is this and ONLY this that I am commenting on, not your desire and efforts to help. It's one thing to be helpful (and even to get it wrong in the process) and another entirely to make definitive comments when you don't know what's being asked.

I'm simply suggesting that when you read something that you don't understand, you shouldn't reply with an implied level of knowledge on the subject that you don't have. Sometimes the best reply is a clarifying question.

Scott, you are free to disagree and articulate your disagreement about the statements I have made. In order to stay on point and maintain some etiquette, it is asked that we follow minimal standards of conduct. I believe the OP was referring to actually hosting NetBIOS/SMB and not running IIS. At no point does he actually ask about running it. However, I still mentioned "resource sharing" to articulate this person's likely desire to run Windows File Sharing through SMB/NetBIOS. With Windows 98 and Windows XP we saw the advent of WebDAV (or Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning). This used OLE and not IIS. It was Microsoft's implementation of RFC4918. This is a protocol that Microsoft, Apple, and many Linux distributions did adopt. Windows UNC conventions created by Microsoft, this allowed Web Sharing folders to be renamed under Windows XP whereas the URL could be converted to a UNC/SMB-type share. This used a WebDAV-redirector service in Windows XP as WebDAV fell out of favor and SMB became the preferred method of file sharing across, at least, LANs.

That has very little to do with IIS. Since SMB and NetBIOS shares have been a preferred method for file sharing over Windows networks as an alternative to FTP and HTTP protocols, you can look towards "Simple File Sharing" and "Web Sharing" in Windows XP as a likely alternative to installing full blown IIS. To this date, Microsoft still keeps open a public NetBIOS/SMB share for IT specialists to download certain utilities by simply plugging in a \\IP or hostname. The address for this can be plugged in as \\live.sysinternals.com using the Run Command.

Users of Windows XP Professional were never advised to use IIS to share files over a network, and when the system is not on a domain, it was recommended to enable networking sharing in Explorer and create NetBIOS shares on a workgroup. Even the Help documentation in XP recommended using the Web Publishing Wizard to upload files to online web servers prior to the introduction of online cloud computing file hosting services like Windows Live SkyDrive. When we talk about IIS in Windows XP, we are talking about limited concurrent connections, very lax security, and a constant need for security hardening. We also know that this web server is not the best method for hosting files on a Windows network.

Once File and Print Sharing is turned on through the Network Setup Wizard in XP, it is possible to share files over a workgroup using Windows Explorer for so long as File and Print Sharing is activated.

When clicking on "Publish This Folder to the Web" you would be sent to the Web Publishing Wizard.

The OP was not entirely clear about what he is trying to do: either share a file on the LAN to someone or what. He is describing "web sharing" in Windows XP, which has very little to do with IIS as a right-click mouse option in Windows XP; unless of course IIS is already installed. Of course, in this case, we need more information from the OP, but the type of "resource sharing" I concluded he was talking about was through NetBIOS/SMB/WebDAV. This is the traditional way to share files over a Windows workgroup and even publicly, if so desired, in a Windows environment without Server.

Microsoft recommends using Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) servers to create a proximity network and secure VPN tunneling if you are going to use "Windows XP" to start hosting websites. I would consider this to be a security nightmare and the definition of absolute insanity. Windows XP is not an operating system that should be used to host a production web server. It is true that I have lacked familiarity with running IIS in Windows XP for security reasons, and here you can see exactly what the OP was likely talking about if he had IIS installed in XP. So in that sense, you may be correct that he was looking to run IIS in Windows 7, which I still would not agree with on principle. However, running it in XP is just a ridiculous, flawed premise at this point. I cannot imagine someone actually using this for production activity.

As of March 2011, 60.31% of the top web servers use Apache. 19.34% use IIS. Using it in Windows XP is an alien concept to me, so I assumed he wanted to run a NetBIOS share.

Even Microsoft is running a NetBIOS/SMB share publically for IT professionals to download utilities at \\live.sysinternals.com\

Nonetheless, because of the archaic nature of this question, I hope that this dialogue has somehow helped the OP in resolving the situation. If that is your intent, and not name calling, such as “you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about” etc, I would like to welcome you to the site and hope you will continue to make these kinds of contributions.

I will not bias myself towards IIS or do a PR stunt about how great this web server is, when its best used internally and definitely not on Windows XP. Consider hiring two or three security gurus for your new high-profile IIS site, perhaps even an entire department if you're going to go down that route. I like the way its built, but common sense takes precedence in hosting materials.

I am happy to see Microsoft offering online cloud-based solutions and not suggesting people run web servers off XP machines.

Take care,
Mike

"In order to stay on point..."

Then why does the rest of your last post go on and on about network sharing, standards, the origins of such features in Windows, publishing documents, and statistics on the most popular web servers when this thread is not discussing that? You've just interjected that with your last post and that certainly takes us away from the point here.

"...and maintain some etiquette, it is asked that we follow minimal standards of conduct."

Agreed. What's your point? What rules of etiquitte have I broken? I have not called anyone names, nor have I stated anything that was untrue. I simply pointed out your mistake and gave some solid and time-tested advice.

"I believe the OP was referring to actually hosting NetBIOS/SMB and not running IIS."

Understood, and that was the root of the problem. If you had just scratched your head and said "Gee, I'm not sure what this guy is talking about because I've never seen that context menu option before and I'm not intimately aware of how IIS integrates with Windows.", maybe you wouldn't have responded with incorrect information and with such certainty. That's all. That's it. No one is saying that you aren't trying to be helpful. Nothing to get all worked up about and nothing to start talking about rules of etiquitte about. It's just some simple advice that will help you be "more helpful" going forward.

Your points are well taken and constructive criticism is always welcome. I believe that the more information we can provide, the better off other individuals will be in making informed decisions. The thread only becomes useless when we make ourselves the subjects of it, or as you have pointed out, provide accidentally erroneous information. It is my belief that your ability to communicate that an error may have been presented, and doing that clearly, has be very helpful in this thread. It is good that we can provide an abundance of information on this subject and explain the concepts from different perspectives. I believe that friendly discourse regarding any subject can be very beneficial. This can be done in the spirit of providing our own experiences, deductive reasoning, and logic to others.

I hope that you can see that my goal is to be respectful to both you and those reading this and participating on the site in the future.

Originally Posted by Scott Marcus

Because IIS is not just some application. It's a core component of Windows and the original question was perfectly clear: "In Windows XP there is option of Web sharing on right clicking on specific folder.".

If the people that replied weren't familiar with this feature, then they shouldn't have replied (especially "Mike", who posted completely incorrect statements [Sharing Windows resources has nothing to do with running a web server.]).

By the way, you know how I found this site/forum/thread? Google. So what's your next piece of "sage" advice?

Interesting how narrow-minded you are. I thought this was specific to linux "penguins" but apparently it is not. IIS is not an application? well great news for you but honestly I don't care whether or not this is a core component in Windows because pretty much everything is a core component of Windows nowadays. That doesn't mean you have to use it or know about it. Especially all those fancy features that don't bring anything good but mass ownage.

And as you seem to be looking for further sage advice, I think you can now go and save other lost Microsoft souls out there.

Originally Posted by sogoodtobe

Interesting how narrow-minded you are. I thought this was specific to linux "penguins" but apparently it is not. IIS is not an application? well great news for you but honestly I don't care whether or not this is a core component in Windows because pretty much everything is a core component of Windows nowadays. That doesn't mean you have to use it or know about it. Especially all those fancy features that don't bring anything good but mass ownage.

And as you seem to be looking for further sage advice, I think you can now go and save other lost Microsoft souls out there.

I'm not sure I understand what your point is? Why does knowing about IIS make me narrow-minded? Why does knowing about IIS mean you have to use it? I never said anything of the sort. Do I seem to be looking for advice? I don't remember asking for any. But, this is a Microsoft Windows Forum, so why wouldn't you expect the topic to largely be about Microsoft products and Microsoft Windows, in particular?

Scott,

I to have an application that I used the "Web Sharing" folder option that was automatically added to folder properties when you installed IIS on 2003 and XP using Internet Explorer as our user interface. We installed Perl and Active server pages in the older OS's and it ran fine. Now that Microsoft has done away with the Web Sharing option and we are testing on Windows 7 and 2008R2 or 2011 I can not get this Bin folder shared with the aliases like we could in the past. Since you understand the Web Sharing issue, and also know that it has nothing to do with file sharing, can you give me directions on how to alias the folder name I want to make my web shared folder? Thank you.

in case you're still wondering about this feature apparently it was removed since windows vista:

List of features removed in Windows Vista - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Support for enabling a folder for web sharing with Internet Information Services via the Windows Explorer interface was removed."

same as you i was using this in windows xp and find it quite annoying to have it removed...