Web Sharing option in Windows 7 ?

Hi,

In Windows XP there is option of Web sharing on right clicking on specific folder. How can we make web sharing in windows 7 OS ?

Sharing Windows resources has nothing to do with running a web server. In previous iterations of Windows, such as Windows XP, you could install IIS web server and run it on port 80. This may not be the same type of resource sharing you are talking about. In Windows 7, files, folders, printers, and other peripheral devices can be shared out to other computers on your network. This is accomplished by accessing a folder, right-clicking on it, and choosing the Sharing tab. You can share any printers to your network by right-clicking on the printer to share it out. For so long as your computers are on the same workgroup, you should be able to find these devices.

In Windows 7, a new option has been instituted called HomeGroups. You can create a HomeGroup to share files easier between systems.

Here is more information about resource sharing in Windows XP: Microsoft Corporation

And some information about how to do it in Windows 7: Share files with someone

If you compare both, you will see that the process has been very much simplified in Windows 7. I hope that this helps answer your question.

To actually share files over the Internet, you would need to create a public SMB share or run IIS server. It is not recommended to share files off Windows publicly without security in place:

Internet firewalls can prevent browsing and file sharing

If you want to share documents, you can investigate Windows Live SkyDrive, for online document storage and file sharing over the Internet. This gives you 25GB of potentially shareable space. I also recommend Dropbox as an extremely reliable alternative.

In addition to Mike's comments above, it's possible that on the XP machine you may have been using some type of third party software similar to HP's "Share to Web" service. I don't remember if that particular product added a menu item to the right click context menu or not but it may have been something like that since it did come as part of the software install packages on many of HP's scanners and AIO (All In One) product offerings.

Share-to-Web upload function
Selecting the Web Upload icon launches the HP Share-to-Web Wizard as shown in Figure 5. This option is used to upload images to an existing Internet photo sharing Web site. A valid account must be established with the service prior to using this feature. Enter your username and password to access the account before selecting Next. Clicking Add/Remove Sites will allow the available sites to be available or not. There is also an option to sign up for HP Photo.
Figure 5: The HP Share to Web Wizard
The available Web sites at this time are listed below:
com
HP Photo
com
Net Documents
Ofoto

SOURCE: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...reg_R1002_USEN

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

You are completely mistaken. If you wish to host a web page from your Windows PC, guess what? You need a web server! The question relates to a feature added to the Windows Shell by IIS that is no longer present in Windows 7.

"In previous iterations of Windows, such as Windows XP, you could install IIS web server and run it on port 80. This may not be the same type of resource sharing you are talking about. "

It's exactly what the OP is describing so why does the rest of your reply ignore the very clear question relating to WEB sharing and proceed to explain everything that DOESN'T relate to WEB sharing?

If you have IIS installed in your copy of XP, a context menu choice called "Sharing & Security" will bring you to a dialog that provides a tab called "Web Sharing" (in addition to the regular "Sharing" tab). This tab allows you to quickly create a virtual directory in IIS for the one that you've right clicked on.

How the hell are the guys supposed to know all applications out there, and more precisely the one that gives the right-clicking option "web sharing"?

I believe the first answers were good as they made some assumptions based on the initial question. I would personally not have enough patience figuring out what the question is actually about. Instead I would point the guy to a website called google and type the words "windows xp web sharing".

Originally Posted by sogoodtobe

How the hell are the guys supposed to know all applications out there, and more precisely the one that gives the right-clicking option "web sharing"?

I believe the first answers were good as they made some assumptions based on the initial question. I would personally not have enough patience figuring out what the question is actually about. Instead I would point the guy to a website called google and type the words "windows xp web sharing".

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?

That is not a question. The question was "In Windows XP there is option of Web sharing on right clicking on specific folder. How can we make web sharing in windows 7 OS ?" And as for the answer, I certaintly don't profess to have all of them. However, you can see that my response was to either make a public SMB share, look up the actual guide to perform file sharing in Windows, 7, acknowledge that the firewall in Windows 7 may create problems for these types of WAN activities, and I also went on to recommend to other file sharing methods (SkyDrive and Dropbox).

Now, when I spoke of resource sharing in Windows, I did not mean CPU or memory utilization, or even network utilization as you may have imagined, and this may have been a misclarification on my part. Surely these are definately important factors in hosting a web server. However, while it was possible to install IIS in Windows XP, this functionality has been, quite wisely, recommended for use on Windows Server. More specifically, I was trying to state that the sharing of individual files, folders, and other Windows File Sharing resources did not have much to do with IIS.

Indeed, after further study, it is possible to install IIS 7 on Windows Vista or Windows 7, however, there are connection limitations; if I am not mistaken similar restrictions existed in Windows XP. Further, running IIS on any client version of Windows would seem to me to be both counterintuitive and counterproductive to the goals of the OP. As you likely know, Scott, most rational individuals (including myself) would not recommend running IIS on Windows client in any kind of production role.

Further, I state that if you would like to do this you may see this document: Installing IIS 7 on Windows Vista and Windows 7 : Installing IIS 7 : Installing and Configuring IIS 7 : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

So certainly, resources are allocated, but not Windows File Sharing as I was trying to articulate. Often times I am trafficked with a large amount of data to sort, and this may have been a misnomer on my part. Further study in this area will show you that it is even possible to run Apache and PHP under a Windows client environment. However, what reasons I would have to instruct the OP to even attempt to do this are unclear.

I hope that you understand that we are not perfect, but we do try to answer questions with some degree of accuracy and a sincere wish to see these questions answered with a satisfactory outcome.

Your latest reply further indicates that you continue to miss the entire point and don't fully understand the question, which is why I suggest that those who don't understand the question, shouldn't try to answer them.

Using IIS on Windows clients has been (for many years) and continues to be extremely commonplace. No one suggested (or even introduced) that this would be for production purposes. Using IIS on a Windows client is extremely useful in small-scale development environments (where servers are not readily available).

The fact is that you took the name of the feature (Web Sharing) to mean the the OP wanted to share a document to the actual WWW. It's perfectly understandable that you would think that, but if you were familiar with IIS, you'd know that this is not what the Web Sharing feature actually is. It simply takes the directory that was right-clicked on and makes it a virtual directory in IIS.

You've indicated that you were not talking about CPU, RAM or Network resources (and I did not take your reply to mean those anyway) and then indicate that you were talking about Windows File Sharing, however "Web Sharing" is actually not related to "Windows File Sharing" and WFS has nothing to do with IIS.

If you knew what this feature is and what it does, you'd know that to share the folder and its documents (the "resources" that you referred to) in this way is absolutely related to IIS, which makes your statement to the contrary incorrect.

Listen, I'm not trying to be rude, but I've spent nearly 15 years contributing to Microsoft newsgroups and now forums and am simply trying to correct inaccurate information and advise others not to post definitive replies when they don't really understand the question in the first place.

By the way, the simple answer is that in Windows 7, the Windows Explorer Shell does not have the Web Sharing extention. You must go into IIS via Computer Management and mark the directory as virtual through the IIS Admin tool.

Scott Marcus;
Hello and welcome to the forums. You participation and contributions as a member of our community is sincerely and greatly appreciated. However it is interesting that the OP (new with only a single post) has not responded to any of the subsequent posted suggestions or possible solutions to his query.

I've spent nearly 15 years contributing to Microsoft newsgroups and now forums and am simply trying to correct inaccurate information and advise others not to post definitive replies when they don't really understand the question in the first place.

No one here purports to make any claim to having a definitive reply. We only do our best to comment on any given request for help to the best of our abilities based on our personal knowledge and experience. I actually even created a blog about this issue a while back as I was deeply concerned about some members who seemed to feel that it was not enough to just post a comment directed specifically to the OP's question but seemed to feel it necessary to deride other members honest efforts to provide some help to the best of their personal ability.
I'm sorry you seem to feel that we somehow fall far short of providing the requisite help that this particular member required, but we always try to do our best while of course also trying to do no harm.
Kind regards
Randy