The problem is with the Library feature, if you have a NAS or File server, and you want to place a network folder within a library, it will not work. Sharing a folder and making it available on the network is easy enough, but if you want to make that network drive or folder available within a library, you can't, unless you use the fix stated.
Libraries are a little different from normal folders. They do not contain data, they act like a aggrogate, it provides quick access to various scattered files and folders. For example...
If you had a large collection of music or movies, it's too big to store on a single storage volume like a hard drive, you have it spilt across different locations. These could include a File Server, a NAS box and multiple Hard drives connected to your local PC, internal and external. Now, you would have to access each drive and network storage separately to manage them. So you would have;
C:\ Music
D:\Media\Music
\\server1\media\music
F:\Music
That's 4 locations to manage. What the library does is pull them all together to a single location -
Libraries\Music. However, if you try and add the \\server1\media\music directory, you would get an error like the following:
That's where the solution posted comes in. It's a matter of convenience really, keeping separate folders and drives of various locations, all neatly combined together. Libraries also provide quick save access within applications, since it has its own listing.
Another way to look at a Library is like an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird. You have multiple email accounts you need to manage, 3 or 4 yahoo/ymail, a couple MSN, AIM, maybe your own mail server. You use the client to organise all the different accounts, so you don't need to log into multiple websites, log in as another user, etc. The client provides a single access point to all of them.
From a more productive point of view, working in an office, you're working on a new project, some of the data is kept on a public server, some on private servers, some of it on your local machine. You have your Word templates on a public server, some Excel statistics on a private server, another public folder for presentations to store Powerpoint files, maybe an image repository, another private for meeting minutes, PDF's, Audits, whatever, they are all over different networks in a very complex business.... or just a poorly managed one. If they didn't have a DMS (Data/Document Management System), or the DMS was down, you would have to go through the maze of directories to get to everything. A library could be used on a per project basis to provide a single location for files and folders involved. It would be cumbersome, but it could be done.
A shortcut just links you to another directory, and a single directory at that. A library is like a shortcut to multiple directories and files simultaneously.
