Recently I ran into a possible drawback to “Open in Windows Explorer”. Here was my issue:
I created a form library that will be used for Performance Appraisals. The forms are created in InfoPath. Mangers connect to the form library, click New, fill out the Performance Appraisal on the employee. I have created a submit button on the form that automatically saves the form to the form library and saves it using the “employee name” and “review date” fields in the form. All is well up to this point.
The real issue that I ran into was, Performance Appraisals are very confidential. Management made the decision that the only person that could see the Performance Appraisal in the form library was the person who created it. That sounded easy enough, I would remove the All Documents view and create a single view that would only display documents created by [Me]. I also changed rights on the form library so nobody could create new views after all, if they could create a view, they could create one that could show all fields in the form library.
Unfortunately, when you select “Open in Windows Explorer” you can see all documents in the form library. The only way I have found around this issue is to Remove the “Open in Windows Explorer” options under Actions. There is one huge drawback with this. When you remove “Open in Windows” is must be at the Site Collection level. You lose it for all of your sites. On the positive side, you can set it up so a Site Owner can still see “Open in Windows Explorer”.
Here are the steps to disable “Open in Windows Explorer” for everyone except site Owners.
- On your SharePoint server go to the following folder and make a copy of the DefaultTemplates.ascx file. \Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES
- Rename the copy of DefaultTemplates.ascx to CustomDefalutTemplates.ascx
- Open CustomDefaultTemplates.ascx in Notepad and change the following line:
- ID=”OpenInExplorer” Change PermissionString=”UseClientIntegration” to PermissionString=”MangeWeb”
- Save the file
- Reset IIS
The original instructions on how to perform this task was found at: SharePoint UK
Thx, it saved me time
Greetings JJR
This is awesome! Thanks for posting. I had the same situation with a client and this is definitely a viable solution.
Cheers!
I have a client and they want to upload multiple documents to the library, only catch is they have to do it 1 document at a time without the Explorer View option.
You’re correct this is an issue and can be a big deal for some people. Internally, our way around the issue is the Administrator still has Explorer View rights. If an entire folder many files need to be uploaded at once, the Administrator does it. Staff resistance has been minimal with this procedure.
you can upload multiple file at once from sharepoint interface, when u click on upload document in the next window there is an option to upload multiple files.