You’re about to dig on the users machine to find out the UNC Path, the true location of the network share their particular “P drive” is pointing to. When you have “P drive” mapped to five different network shares from ten random workstations, good luck. When a user calls for support they will only be able to tell you “I can’t get to my P drive”. As any seasoned IT support veteran will tell you, on large networks there will inevitably be multiple “P drives” or a few “X drives” where X and P can be any letter in the alphabet, redundantly.What are the limitations and issues caused by mapped drives: That is more of a convenience to avoid potential issues of mapped drives than a benefit. Sure administrators can map drives to network resources using scripts so end users are not choosing their own random, often conflicting drive letters. Any other administrators who can think of any other benefit of a mapped drive, leave a comment. I’m not sure why one is more confusing than the other in the end users brain but in my experience if I use the word “share” users give me the blank look of evil. This means an administrator can say “open your N drive” verses “open your Accounting share” or “your Accounting shared folder”. It is easy to reference for end users to understand.So what are the real benefits of using “mapped drives” designated by a chosen drive letter: We are reaching a point in computing where even end users can essentially be considered computer illiterate if they do not know the UNC Path to the files they work with daily.
#MAPPED DRIVES WINDOWS#
Mount points and Apple “Server Connections” both require knowledge of the files real, genuine name of shared folder location on the network, often called the “UNC Path” in the Windows world, which stands for Universal Naming Convention. Linux, Unix and other operating systems including Apple OSX use “mount points” or in Apples case, “Connect to Server” (which is almost as bad as a mapped drive letter n but not quite). For historical reference, only Windows has “mapped drives”. Not one article I’ve found correctly addressed the issues surrounding mapping drives by letter verses their supposed benefits which are limited. I’ve been reading forum comments regarding the “pros and cons of mapped drives”.
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