UW Colleges Information Technology
Remote File Access via WebDAV
(for Personal Computers/Res Life/Off Campus)
See instructions for Macintosh, Vista/Windows 7.
WebDAV is an abbreviation for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. WebDAV provides the functionality to create, change and move documents on a remote server as if they were stored in a local directory on your personal computer. It can replace FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and VPN for transferring files between campus network drives and home computers.
WebDAV is available to Windows or Macintosh users on faculty/staff home directories only, which are more familiar to some users as “My Documents.”
Connecting to WebDAV from your off-campus Windows PC:
- First, navigate to My Network Places. Depending on the setup of your PC:
- Click on the Start menu and select My Network Places.
- If there is no My Network Places on the start menu, you will have to go to My Computer and select My Network Places on the left side menu.
- Double-click the Add a Network Place icon from within "My Network Places".
If there is no Add Network Places icon, click on Add a Network Place under the Network Tasks menu on the left.
- The “Add Network Place” wizard will appear. Click Next.
- Select choose another network location and click Next.
- Fill in the proper URL for the Internet or network address. It's important that the slashes ("//") are entered correctly. (The address should end with your username in place of the firstname.lastname shown below.)
- You may receive the following message. There is no security risk, this is sometimes caused by an issue with the certificate. Simply select Yes to continue
- After clicking Next, you are immediately prompted to login (authenticate) to the UWCX network. Use the same username and password that you use to logon to your campus computer.
- You will then be prompted to name the network connection you have setup. You can use the default name that will pop up as in the example below, or you can name the connection something such as “UWC Folders” if you like.
- To open the new connection, keep the "Open this network place when I click Finish" box checked and click Finish. You will need to log in again using your UserID (in the form firstname.lastname) and password. If the log in window does not pop up in front of the network wizard window, look for the log in window in the task bar.
- Upon successful login, a folder window will open up revealing all of the files in your home folder/My Documents as shown in the following example.
- An icon for the share will be created within the My Network Places window.
- A folder representing the network share will now appear in your My Network Places directory and will remain there until you delete it. Each time you need to access your files, double-click the folder. You will need to log in again with your username and password once whenever you restart your PC.
NOTE:
You may want to add https://*.uwex.uwc.edu to your list of Internet Explorer trusted sites. Within Internet Explorer, select Tools, Internet Options, Security. Select Trusted Sites, type in the URL and select Add. Doing so will suppress the warning message when accessing this services from a remote location.
