Age old tail of Mac and PC users sending emails to files on the network...

Rosko
Contributor II
Contributor II

Okay, so I'm sure you've all probably heard of this issue. Just hoping maybe someone out there has found a solution.

We have a mixed PC/Mac environment and most of our Executives are on Macs, but there direct reports are not always on macs and the problem comes into play when a PC user sends a link to an Excel file (for example) on our network, say "O:FOLDERSUBFOLDERFile.XLS". Well, obviously the Mac isn't going to be able to open that link, instead the user has to be smart enough to Connect to Server and type "smb://FILESERVER/SHARE/FOLDER/SUBFOLDER/File.XLS". Which we all know doesn't happen much.

We really just need a solution to this age old issue. We found an app called WinShortcutter from Lobotomo.
http://www.lobotomo.com/products/WinShortcutter/index.html

But that app seems to be left behind, with no real updates on the site or anything. I would love to have a server solution that would run on our Exchange servers and convert the links, but would settle for a application on the Mac clients that you just click the link and it recognizes it as a PC shortcut and does the quick conversion based on some info we'd obviously have to input.

This is just getting to be a constant talking point with our Executives and they are pushing for it to not be so complicated.

Any input, experience or recommendations is highly welcome.

Thanks!

9 REPLIES 9

Rosko
Contributor II
Contributor II

Okay...maybe I should proofread first ;) lol

Age old tale...

lehmanp00
Contributor III

We trial'd something called mobileEcho a few years ago. Worked great, but out of our price range to implement.

It basically ran a AFP service on Windows to allow 'easy' access for Mac users.

Looks like they rolled it into a bigger enterprise-class suite for connectivity:

http://www.grouplogic.com/enterprise-file-sharing/access/

calum_rmit
New Contributor III

Sharepoint?

jhalvorson
Valued Contributor

The following may make you sad...

Our storage team exports a text file to me that has all the FQDN addresses for the department shares. I convert that to excel, then use Word mail merge to generate a html table, with alternate colored rows so that's beautiful to the eye. The first column is the department name and the second column is in the format of smb://servername/sharename Users with pre 10.7 are instructed to visit the web page and then search on their department using command + F in their browser. Those with 10.7 or later are instructed to map using the DFS address.

It's horrible and outdated the moment I post it on our internal web site. But that's how we've been informing our Mac users of the 3400+ department shares.

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

While I haven't had to do anything like this, you may be able to put together an Automator action saved a s text input service that would convert the Windows address into a more Mac friendly one and then have it open that link in the Finder.

For example, use a script in the Automator action to take the selected text, in this case, the O:FOLDERSUBFOLDERFile.XLS and convert it with some sed commands. The tricky part would be converting the "O" in this case to the proper server name. Might need to feed the script a list of server names for each drive letter that you know about so it can do the conversion correctly. The rest can be done purely in sed. For example:

$ echo "O:FOLDERSUBFOLDERFile.XLS" | sed -e 's/[A-Z]:\/smb:///;s/\///g'
$ smb://FOLDER/SUBFOLDER/File.XLS

As mentioned, its not inputting the server name, but that may be possible with a more involved script.

Once you have a script that can do the conversion correctly, you can save this as a service from Automator. The Mac user can then select/highlight the address in the email and either type a keyboard shortcut assigned to the Service, or go up to the application menu > Services > Service Name, to run it. You could either have the script copy it to their clipboard with "pbcopy" or do something like tell Finder to open the address automatically.

I'm only thinking this out loud, but in general Automator can be quite good at these types of conversions and text manipulations.

jhalvorson
Valued Contributor

With Windows, I can enter at the command prompt, ```
net view servername
``` and it will display all of the available share names.

Is there a command for OS X that would do the same? I don't want to mount any of the shares but I do want to view what shares are available.

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

Hmm, that's a good question. Not sure if there's a way from the cli. I know in Finder in Connect to Server, if you enter only the base server name, not a specific share point, you usually get presented a list of available shares in a "Select the volumes you want to mount on "server name":" dialog.
I just don't know how you'd get the equivalent list in the command line or a script.

Chris
Valued Contributor

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

@Chris, that's the ticket!

#!/bin/sh

loggedInUser=$( ls -l /dev/console | awk '{print $3}' )
availShares=$( smbutil view //$loggedInUser@BaseServerName | awk '/Disk/{print $1}' )

echo "$availShares"

Nice! :)