Willamette University

Willamette Integrated Technology Services

Groupfiles: Mapping your Department Share to a Drive

Basic Instructions

You can connect to the Groupfiles share at the root level, which will show you every share that exists and give you access to the _IN and _OUT box in each share or you can connect directly to the department share(s) that you use regularly.  This process is simple from either Windows or OSX: 

Mapping an individual department share

To map a direct path to the department shares you use the most (i.e. for your primary department or a work group you belong to), follow the basic drive mapping instructions in the appropriate link  above and enter this text to specify the drive you want to connect to:

  • \\groupfiles.willamette.edu\’departmentsharename’ (e.g. ‘wits’ or ‘Rhetoric’)

You will be immediately dropped in to the specific department share and see a listing of all the folder and files that you have access to.

Mapping the whole \dept share

If you connect to the root level of Groupfiles, you can see a listing of all the department shares visible to you and share files with other departments using the _In and _Out folders.  To map a path to the whole listing of departmental shares, follow the basic drive mapping instructions in the appropriate link  above and enter this text to specify the drive name:

  • \\groupfiles.willamette.edu\dept

This can be a useful view for a few reasons:

  1. You can browse to any of the shares that you are a member of without needing to map each one to a different drive letter.
  2. You access to every department’s _IN and _OUT folders (*See the description of _IN _OUT Folders here)
  3. **During the transition this will give you a definitive list of the shares that have been moved to Groupfiles (instead of living on \\home)
  4. You can locate the full path name of the department share so you can map it directly if you choose to.