Background

My office uses:

• Microsoft SharePoint to store and version our documents
• Microsoft Office, with Microsoft Document Connection to connect to the SharePoint site.

Question 1

Can Finder connect to a SharePoint server?

Question 2

Can MacFUSE be extended to mount a SharePoint path as a volume in Mac OS X?

Solution 1:

System-managed WebDAV connections to SharePoint

Yes, connections are possible. For a volume mounted in this way, the file system type is:

• webdav

I use Finder — in Snow Leopard and in two other versions of the system — with SharePoint.

To connect

In the Connect to Server window of Finder, use the same URL as you would use in Microsoft Document Connection.

An underlying problem with the Microsoft service

Information about the characters that you cannot use in sites, folders, and files in SharePoint

… cannot start a file name with the period character. …

Apps with compatibility issues

A shortlist:

• Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2011 (Service Pack 2) — all attempts to save will fail, expect to see error messages that are misleading
• Apple Finder — some attempts to copy or move to SharePoint may fail.

My answer to Ask Different question Why are dot underscore ._ files created, and how can I avoid them? notes:

• requirements of Microsoft Office 2011, when used with a file system such as webdav, are not met by SharePoint.

When SharePoint does not recognise that a user of PowerPoint or Word with webdav has opened a file, there's risk of dataloss — two or more users overwriting each other's work, with no warning before or after the loss. I can't reproduce this problem when NeoOffice is used to open such files.

Excel with webdav seems to always open .xlsx spreadsheets read-only. I can't reproduce this problem when NeoOffice is used to open such files.

(Side note: without file system type webdav, Microsoft Document Connection 14.2.0 (120402) causes dataloss without warning, of extended attributes such as Spotlight comments.)

More about Finder

With webdav, for files and folders that are already on the SharePoint server:

• Finder seems to be a first class app for renaming, moving or removing items.

Apps that are more compatible

Another shortlist:

• where Microsoft Office applications fail, NeoOffice and LibreOffice succeed.

Input/output errors affecting files saved in Microsoft formats

If an attempt to open an Office Open XML file (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx etc.) fails with an input/output error:

1. use Microsoft Document Connection to initiate an edit
2. save a trivial change to the file, close the window of the app that you used for edition
3. if necessary, quit the app that you used for edition.

Those two or three steps seem to resolve, or work around, the error.

(If I discover the exact cause of those types of input/output error, I'll either add to this answer or link to a question elsewhere. Early indications are that they occur only after a Microsoft Office app has failed to save with webdav.)

Solution 2:

I'm entering this away from Windows world, but if memory serves the URL you are getting from Sharepoint is probably something like \my.sharepoint.somewhere\some\path\to\stuff

You need to convert that into something more portable.

Go into Finder, and on the "Go" menu choose "Connect to server..."

Enter "smb://my.sharepoint.somewhere/some/path/to/stuff"

You could also try clicking the "Browse" button and as long as the Sharepoint share is being advertised on the local LAN you should be able to locate the server and browse it's shared folders.

There are a couple of things to be aware of.

1) Make sure you can resolve the "my.sharepoint.somwhere" name to an IP address. (Use the Lookup option in Network Utility to confirm this.)

2) Your Mac may need to be a member of the Windows domain to be able to connect. Sorry - it's been a while and I cannot remember if this is a requirement with Sharepoint.

Hope that helps!

Solution 3:

I'd be curious if you get this working. I can connect to our SharePoint 2010 server via the Finder (Snow Leopard 10.6.6), but any files copied to the share fail with a -36 error. The file appears on the share, but has 0 bytes. Copying with the command line works fine.

fwiw, I'm using https://my.sharepoint.school.edu/personal/username/ in Go > Connect to Server…

Using Transmit works, other linux and Windows clients work, but Finder and apps in Microsoft Office have problems.

See http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=809401

Update:

After some more detective work, I think I've found a cause of some problems: SharePoint has filename restrictions that conflict with the way the system stores extended attributes or resource forks on file systems that lack support for those things.

Restrictions in SharePoint include: disallowing filenames that begin or end with a period. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905231 for the full set of restrictions.

When using Finder to copy a file (example: foo) to a SharePoint WebDAV share, the system may require a counterpart (example: ._foo) during or after the write. Disallowance will cause a write operation to fail.

This also explains why third-party WebDAV clients such as Cyberduck and Transmit appear more compatible — with some types of connection, they lose metadata.

For a volume mounted by Transmit with a WebDAV HTTPS connection to SharePoint, the file system type is not webdav, it's:

• transmitdiskfs

Unless the Finder stops the ._filename stuff when writing to webdav shares, or SharePoint starts accepting periods at the beginning of filenames, I don't think you'll be able to reliably use Finder with SharePoint WebDAV shares.