As a consultant working with Office 365, I get to see many new sceanrios that no one was anticipating. Office 365 has opened the world in interesting ways. One common scenario is that companies are using Office 365 with SharePoint Online and asking external consultants to particiate in their Office 365 environment. Traditionally, when companies had people using SharePoint, they controlled the client machines, but now that third parties are participating, client machines are not always governed. The problems that result are farter for several excellent blog posts.
In this post I focus on one scenario: The external user is able to log in to SharePoint and acess the libraries. The external user is even able to open the library "with explorer," but the user is unable to create new folders or drag existing folders from the computer to the library.
When users try to create a new folder or drag an existing folder to the file explorer window, they get the an error dialogs that says:
"An unexpetced error is keeping you from creating the folder. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.
Error 0x800700E0. Access Denied..."
Screenshots are shown below. These error messsages are deceiving. I could not find any Microsoft documentation or blog posts that talk about the real root cause.
What is going on? One of the challenges os diagnosing this issue is that a I cannot expect these third party consultants to spend much time with me, and I certainly have trouble brokering a three way screen sharing meeting with the third party and Microsoft support!
After quite a bit of tinkering, I was able to reproduce the issue and then I contacted Microsoft support. After an hour we figured out the issue.
The problem can be summarized as follows:
When you install Office 2013, the installer does some magic on the client machine that makes things work. For machines that do not have Office 2013 installed, you must do the magic yourself. Of course Microsoft's take on this is, "All machines in the world have Office 2013!." Not ture!
Two reasons I have run into as exceptions to the Microsoft Office 2013 rule:
Reason 1: One consutant I am working with uses a Mac. He does have Office 2011 installed on the Mac, but in order to copy a group of folders to SharePoint I instructed him to use Windows. To do this, he installed Parallells with WIndows 8.1 on his Mac. Of course he did not install Office 2013 on the virtual machine. Why should he?
Reason 2: Many people are still using Office 2010 and do not want to upgrade to Office 2013.
So, What is the magic? It turn out that the Office 2013 installation process causes the Windows Service called "WebClient" to run automatically. If you do not have Office 2013 installed, then the WebClient service does not start autmatically. Even installing the OneDrive for Business client does not cause the WebClient service to run automatically.
So, how do you change the settings? It's realtively easy:
1. Go to the start menu in the WIndows 7, 8, or 8.1.
2. Run the following: "services.msc"
3. A list of services will appear. Scroll through the list and find "WebClient" (See the first picture below)
4. double click on "WebCLient." Change the Startup type from Manual to Automatic. (See the second picture below)
That should do it!
I hope this helps people who have run into this issue.