Open in Explorer View fails on Windows 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2007

When I was building up a MOSS 2007 Environment recently (actually at the start of May), I had a lot of trouble opening document libraries in Explorer view. Like all good developers I have the latest and greatest software stack on my trusty workstation (Apparently this company does have a standard operating environment, but whatever).

Anyway,as I was ahead of the curve in terms of OS (2008 R2) and App (Office 2007), I was having difficulty opening a doc Library in explorer view. It was just me, so I was on my own to fix it (I can still hear the Service desk team snickering as they hung up the phone after offering to rebuild my laptop with the latest SOE – Still XP and Office 2003 at that stage…).

After hunting for ages on the web, this guy nailed it. http://netindonesia.net/blogs/andriyadi/archive/2010/01/04/wss-3-0-sp2-on-windows-server-2008-r2-open-with-windows-explorer-failed.aspx

The issue was a mix of Client side and Server side problems – WebDAV!

For the Client – you need to have the Desktop Experience feature activated if you are running a server OS,and the WebClient service running and starting automatically.

For the server – Because it’s IIS7,you also need to DISABLE (remove) the IIS WebDAV module from the site causing you trouble. This will not only let you “Open in Explorer view”, but it will also let you map the document library as a network folder in Windows Explorer!

Sorted!

Thanks go to Andri Yadi for outlining most of the indicated steps above. At least 2010 “just works”… well, not really… but you don’t have to spend much time configuring the OS as you do configuring the app.

Cheers!