Mirosoft WebDAV DLL and Redirector Versions and Issues

A small German based company (greenbytes, one of the owners is included in some of the WebDAV RFCs) has done a terrific job in collecting all kind of informations about the MSDAIPP.DLL (Web Folder Client) and the MRXDAV.SYS (WebDAV Mini-Redirector).

You can find all Windows and Hotfix Versions of these files and links to all available Microsoft KB-Articles and documents related.

Give it a try:

Web Folder Client (MSDAIPP.DLL) Versions and Issues List
http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webfolder-client-list.html

WebDAV Mini-Redirector (MRXDAV.SYS) Versions and Issues List
http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webdav-redirector-list.html

DavCopy - The WebDAV robocopy edition

This one is a must have for everyone working with native WebDAV or Sharepoint as a WebDAV Server:

DavCopy
http://www.bluedoglimited.com/Downloads/default.aspx

It's a kind of xcopy / robocopy for WebDAV, you can do simple thins like

DavCopy.exe test\folder\readme.doc “http://server.com/shared documents/”

or funny things like

/s /xf *docs\*c* w* /xd reports how-to lang

and most important, it supports command line authentication for batch jobs.

Microsoft WebDAV Hotfix - KB 933771

Last one for today - this one is really ugly: Microsoft Windows Vista crashes when using encryption with WebDAV. Sometimes I wonder about the quality of test procedures at Microsoft - based on several good articles found on microsoft.com WebDAV is the preferred protocol to work work securely against file servers because it is the only protocol offered by Microsoft which encrypts the communication over the network - in addition to the encrypted EFS files.

But it seems no one cared - copy one small EFS-encrypted file to a WebDAV share says goodby to your Explorer.

Details:

In Windows Vista, the Svchost.exe process stops responding when you try to copy encrypted Encrypting File System (EFS) files to a Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) resource. If you use Windows Explorer to do this, Windows Explorer stops responding. You may have to restart the computer.

Note The Svchost.exe process hosts the WebClient service.

When you try to save an encrypted 2007 Microsoft Office document to a WebDAV resource, you may receive an error message that says that the document cannot be saved.

The KB Article can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933771

Microsoft WebDAV Hotfix - KB 931770

Another update - this time it's a hotfix - coming from Microsoft Support. This one addresses the following:

On a Windows Vista-based computer, when you try to copy files from a server on a network, the copy process may stop responding (hang), and you may receive a message that resembles the following:

Calculating Time Remaining
0 minutes remaining

This problem may occur only occasionally.


The detailed KB Article can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931770

Well, the bad new is that even when the hotfix is installed on my Vista machine the copy or move process fails quite often. Sometimes with an error message (I am still digging into this issue) and sometimes it just freezes.

Microsoft WebDAV Software Update - KB 90703

Microsoft has releases a Software Update for Windows XP and Windows Vista which solves the following issues:

This update fixes various issues that may occur when you use Web folders from the client computer to connect to a server that supports Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV).

This update fixes the following issues:

• A document that is opened from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site may be downloaded two times when you click Edit in Microsoft Office program.
• The download progress indicator does not work for some documents on the SharePoint site.
• You cannot rename or copy files that have a display name in a non-Internet Information Services (IIS) Web folder.

Additionally, this update includes security enhancements to Web folders.

The detailed KB Article can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907306

Well, it looks like Microsoft starts to care about WebDAV... somehow.

Map a drive via FTP or WebDav

Source: Map a drive via FTP or WebDav

Talking about an alternative approach to connect to WebDAV shares, there is an application out there I tried some time ago (Novell "Net Drive" aka "Webdrive"). I was not too happy with this application because of heavy issues with the cache consistency and the many explorer freezes I had, but Simon writes in his blog about the licensing confiusion I din't know about before. Good reading.

WebDAV, Branch Offices and Sharepoint 2007

Given the numerous options a customer has to plan an enterprise wide storage architecture it is not easy to decide about. But during the last 24 months a lot of customers have thought about their enterprise architecture in general and their branch office infrastructure in detail.

Some have chosen to continue to use SMB/CIFS with the help of DFS and delta-replication in R2 and may have even invested in helper technologies from several 3rd parties which offer “branch office boxes” to help cache SMB traffic. These customers will benefit a lot from the upcoming Vista client replication and offline capabilities offered with the Vista release of CSC.

But on the other hand especially the large enterprises do not want to continue the heavy investments of redundant server islands in sometimes hundreds of branch offices and these customers search for combined enterprise storage and document platform solutions which could be offered from products like SharePoint 2007. A lot of good arguments could make this plan working:

• There’s a trend to NOC service centric infrastructures driven by the concepts of the Jericho group and evangelists like Microsoft’s Steve Riley called the “death of the perimeter”. Consolidating the enterprise infrastructure services (storage, collaboration, etc) in secured network operation centers and offering these services to desktop and mobile clients worldwide.

• There’s a general understanding to use more intelligent file servers with collaboration and workflow capabilities

• There are a lot of Microsoft Evangelists praying to use SharePoint instead of file servers
  

• Only WebDAV offers encrypted network transport when not using IPSec

That said it is an attractive strategy to plan upcoming infrastructures around SharePoint 2007. There is a lot of uniqueness against competition in such an infrastructure and it would be a win-win for Microsoft and its customers: The customer can benefit from a streamlined, very productive and scalable architecture and Microsoft establishes the fundament for a long term Vista/Office/Server environment.

But instead of investing in a good implementation of WebDAV as an alternative approach for enterprise storage the reality in XP and Vista shows an unfinished WebDAV client:

• WebDAV/EFS support in Vista results in instant deterministic crashes which leads to the assumption that it was not even worth testing to Microsoft QA

• WebDAV/Windows Explorer often freezes the Explorer when used in copy operations and makes it instable or even unusable

• WebDAV/CSC (Offline Folders) is not implemented at all. That means the very important technology to work with server documents while on the road is not possible with SharePoint. (The alternative approach to sync with Outlook 2007 has several caveats worth to write a separate document – most obvious the missing possibility to create documents while offline; Similar caveats exist when used with Groove).

Conclusion: Microsoft would offer an attractive technology with SharePoint/Office System 2007 in combination with Microsoft Vista if the underlying technology in Vista would support the obvious need to work with documents the way users are expecting: secure, stable and ready for mobile usage.

Why another Blog about WebDAV?

The WebDAV specification was developed in the mid 90's and several RFCs describe the details about the protocol itself and other needed details like the attributes or security specs. But being available for nearly 10 years now it seems that there is still no perfect solution for a day-to-day usage of WebDAV as the primary protocol to access documents and other files in a corporate environment. Beside its obvious advantages like founding on the well known HTTP protocol and the well know SSL/TLS security channel it seems that the reality is affected by the poor Microsoft implementation in Windows XP and Vista, the poor implementation in several commercial server products and the absence of an offline solution.

The intention of this blog is to collect all available resources to make WebDAV a usable choice for corporations and private users.