I did a few checks on the Windows network in the office today to confirm the capabilities of OS2008 in an environment with a bunch of different Windows shares. This is what I found:

- The OS2008 File Manager sees the shared folders just fine and can access files from them.

- It turns out that everybody has turned off the username/password checking on all our commonly-used shared folders because it was such a pain in the butt to manage with Windoze.

- Some of our networked systems don't show up at all, but I can find them in Windoze using a computer name search. The OS2008 File Manager can't see those systems either, and I couldn't find any way to search for a computer by name.

- I created a shared folder on the server with restricted access, and the N800 File Manager sees it under Shared Folders (after a few refresh attempts), but shows the contents as empty (no error message or password prompt).

That's actually no worse than my WinXP notebook: it wouldn't show the shared folders list of the server at all on the first 5 tries, telling me "Access denied". On the 6th try it succeeded with no changes made. For the protected folder contents it just shows "Access denied". Frankly I wouldn't have the patience to get password-protected access working in Windoze, having struggled with it many times before - I'd just turn off the protection if I needed access to the folder, as everybody else obviously did already! A classic example of security that doesn't work because it's too complex to use. Gone are the days when you could just specify a simple password for a Windoze shared resource.