Piotr Malinski's Library tagged Alfresco →  View Popular

CIFS has a number of advantages over WebDAV and Microsoft SharePoint Protocol:

1. Mounting drives. With CIFS, it is easy for anyone to mount the repository as a shared drive without any client software. It can be a replacement for your “S:”
   drive.
2. Offline synchronization. Microsoft has put in a lot of effort to allow the Windows file
   system to be able to synchronize changes with a shared drive. You can do that
   with Alfresco without any client software. You cannot do this with WebDAV. At
   Documentum, we spent years trying to create this type of
   capability.
   
3. Microsoft Briefcase. If you want to take a few items to work at home or on the plane and synchronize
   them when you get back to the office, you can do that with CIFS and it requires
   no client software. If you try this with WebDAV, explorer declares the items as
   “orphans”.
   
4. More properties. CIFS
   has a lot more properties visible in Explorer: Just right mouse click on one of
   the columns in your Explorer window to see the options available: author, title,
   date created, comments, etc. These are captured automatically by rules in
   Alfresco. With WebDAV, you really only get name, date and
   URL.
5. Single Sign On. If the user is using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, CIFS and IE share a common authentication and login mechanism and therefore one can simulatenously login to both, again with no client software.
6. Automatic versioning. Through the CIFS protocol, we can see better what programs like Microsoft Word are intending when they open, save and seek information. We can therefore predictively version content and provide for recovery of old versions of documents. Something that you can't even get with normal shared file drives.