As part of a project some years ago I was looking for a way to integrate an ftp server storing data from an application as a mapped drive under Windows.
To my surprise there weren’t many offerings out there for this sort of capability. The one that caught my eye at the time was Webdrive and I used it successfully for that particular problem. Recently it needed another airing as a client required access to data – extracted on schedule as xml but stored on a Redhat Linux server. The windows based app that need to consume and process the information to then transmit it via EDI did not have the capability to access the data directly so we installed Webdrive – created an FTP user and made their home directory on the Linux machine – the folder where the extracts would be created. We mapped a drive letter using Webdrive and confirmed that the PC could see the mapped drive and the files on it. A tweak of the refresh interval for that drive letter later and we had a solution.
The product is not expensive and for less that £40 you can save yourself a lot of work with scripts and other tools !! It also works for Mac’s running OSX so this could give you some very nice solutions for information sharing and collaborations…
As its developers describe it …
Unlike a typical FTP client, WebDrive allows you to open and edit server-based files without the additional step of downloading the file. Using a simple wizard, you assign a network drive letter to the FTP Server. By connecting through a virtual drive, there is no need to learn a separate FTP client interface. You access and edit files on the server the same way that you interact with files on your local PC