SharePoint 2010 and WebDAV

Updated 08-10-2011: Please see update here

I have known for sometime that SharePoint supports WebDAV, and in my experience, you always end up spending a few hours getting it to work. Today was no different.

A collogue of mine sent me an email complaining he couldn’t connect to he's SharePoint 2010 site in explore or use the Explorer View button within the site. "Open with Explorer”

I knew I had seen it work in the past but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work for me neither. I tried everything but no matter what I just kept getting an annoying “Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer”

And when connecting with “net use * https://blah.blah” I would constantly get

System error 224 has occurred.

Access Denied. Before opening files in this location, you must first add the web site to your trusted sites list, browse to the web site, and select the option to login automatically.

there is a billion hits on Google searching for this, but one of the more interesting was a White paper on Microsoft.com - Understanding and Troubleshooting the SharePoint Explorer View but it didn’t really get me any further.

I’m using Claimsbased authentication on all SharePoint sites, so I started thing it had something to do with that. I found this post, that claims you cannot connect to SharePoint if it using Forms based authentication / Claimsbased authentication. But then I test on my local computer where I also SharePoint installed configured to use Claims too, and that works. This was starting to be really annoying

God know how, but then I cam across this post. Note that he writes:

The Open with Explorer and the new Upload Multiple seems to depend on Office 2010 being installed.

So I was clicking around inside SharePoint as a maniac and at one point I hit the “Connect to Office” button, and suddenly it worked.

I instantly opened a DOS prompt and tried “net use * https:\\blah” and it worked too.

So while writing this blog post, I created a new SharePoint site with English language instead of Danish to make some better screenshots. And clicking Connect to Office just didn’t seem to be enough, so I started looking at the differences between the Danish site and the English site. 2 things where different. I normally don’t enable Anonymous Access, but I had done that on the Danish site.

And I normally don’t enable Basic authentication, but I had here.

Still nothing. This was driving me nuts now …. so I started clicking around like a maniac again, and BAM suddenly it all worked again. What the hell ???

Now I was getting mad. I created a new site ( Basic authentication disabled, and Anonymous Access disabled like normal ). View in Explorer fails as expected. I click the “Datasheet View”

And after that everything suddenly works. I guess the trick here is making sure Office have “talked” with the SharePoint site in some way or the other.

What a waste of a few good hours I will never get back …