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KB ID: 4373

Product: WS5000N Series

Creating a Shared Folder in Windows Storage Server 2012

This document will explain how to create a shared folder from within Windows File Explorer. For steps on doing this from a command line see here. For steps on creating a share using Windows PowerShell see here.

Open Windows File Explorer and navigate to the folder to be shared.
Right-click on the folder to be shared and click “Properties”.
On the folder properties dialog box click the “Security” tab.
Click the “Advanced” button.
By default, the folder will inherit the security settings from the parent folder. In order to ensure that only the desired users can access the folder, click the “Disable inheritance” button.
Click “Remove all inherited permissions from this object” .
Note that the “Administrators” group still has “Full control” permission for the folder. Click the “Add” button to add permissions for additional groups.
Click the “Select a principal” link at the top of the dialog box.
Click the “Advanced” button.
Click the “Find Now” button to obtain a list of users and groups.
First, we’ll add a group that will have read only access to the share. Select the desired group from the list and click “OK”. NOTE: It is recommended that individual users are never granted permissions. Permissions should be granted to groups to reduce administrative overhead. That way if a user changes roles you can just change their group membership rather than track down every resource needed and change their access on each resource.
Check to be sure the correct group was selected and click “OK”.
By default, only the read only permissions are selected. Since we want to give this group read only access anyway, we’ll just click “OK” here without making any changes.
Next we want to add another group that will have full access to the folder. Click the “Add” button to add another group.
Click on “Select a principal”.
Click the “Advanced” button.
Click the “Find Now” button.
Select the group that will have full permissions for the folder and click “OK”.
Verify that the correct group is listed and click “OK”.
We want to give this group full permissions, so click the “Full control” checkbox and then click the “OK” button.
Verify that each group added has the correct permissions. We always want these permissions to propagate to subfolders, so we’ll click the checkbox for “Replace all child object…” at the bottom and then click “OK”.
Click “Yes” on the following dialog box.
Now that we have the desired permissions for the folder set, click on the “Sharing” tab.
Click the “Advanced Sharing” button to set up the share.
Click the checkbox for “Share this folder”. The default share name will be the folder name. If you want the share to appear as a different name you can change it here. If this share is to be a hidden share, add a $ to the end of the share name. When you have the name set as desired click the “Permissions” button to set the share permissions.
For the share permissions we’ll just set “Everyone” to “Full Control”. Windows will always use the most restrictive set of permissions for every user, so by setting the share permissions to full control we are passing the job of handling permissions to the more restrictive folder security permissions handled by NTFS. Click the “OK” button to continue.
Unless any further changes are desired, click the “OK” button to finish.
The network path of the share is now shown as expected. To finish, click the “OK” button.
The shared folder should now be accessible on the network. Repeat this process to create any other shares needed.