[Deploying Sakai] Windows 7 issues

David Adams da1 at vt.edu
Mon Nov 9 11:56:16 PST 2009


Nathan Finley wrote:
> We have several faculty who have already upgraded to Windows 7.  While I have
> an instance of Windows 7, it’s not my every day machine at this point.  One
> faculty member discovered that WebDAV in the Resources tool does not work
> correctly with Windows 7.  I’m wondering if anyone has discovered other
> issues with Windows 7 and Sakai.  Anyone have any suggested work arounds at
> this point?

Windows's built-in DAV client has never worked properly with Sakai. With XP it was usable, but as of Vista it no longer works. I'm pretty sure someone within Sakai talked to Microsoft about it and the gist was that the problem is some pretty big differences in assumptions made by either piece of the transaction, and since it would be a big effort to fix it, interoperability of the built-in DAV client with things like Sakai was nowhere close to being on MS's priority list.

(In my past lives at other jobs, I had always found the built-in DAV client in Windows to be flaky and problematic even against Microsoft servers, so I'm always surprised to find other people making use of it enough to expect it to work with Sakai.)

Our solution at VT is to encourage our users to use other DAV clients. We have a site license for WebDrive and I find it works very well with Sakai, and gives you features MS's DAV client lacks (or used to lack--I haven't checked Windows 7 for this) such as mounting DAV shares as drives. FWIW, OSX's built-in DAV client doesn't get along with Sakai very well either, and so we have a similar policy for Macs as well.

David Adams
Director of Systems Integration and Support
Virginia Tech Learning Technologies


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