Novell NetDrive: Webdav client for Windows

Got to offload this tip from OSCOM before I forget. NetDrive is a free client, provided by Novell, to allow access to Webdav servers from Windows, by mapping a drive.

Quite a few of the CMS’s presented as OSCOM make use of Webdav to allow easy update of content, including eZ publish and Typo for PHP (plus PEAR::HTTP_WebDavServer).

Personally don’t have much first hand experience with Webdav but talking to those that have at OSCOM got reports of patchy client implementations on Windows, that don’t play well with anything but Microsoft’s own server technologies. Apparently it’s bad enough for projects like Life CMS to implement their own Virtual File system, by overriding Linux filesystem calls (which is a long way to go if you’re trying to build a CMS!).

The NetDrive tip is thanks to Ivan Ristic, who PHP coders may know from PHP Traveller. Got more to say later, about what Ivan’s been doing with mod_security, which is a great project.

Anyway – personally hadn’t heard of NetDrive before and wasn’t the only one surprised to hear of it. Strikes me Novell have a real problem getting their message out there. Danese Cooper gave an insightful talk on the impact corporate blogs are having at Sun – perhaps Novell could learn something? The Novell / Suse / Ximian thing seems to be happening pretty quietly which is surprising given the potential…