Windows includes many resources for networking devices together. In this video, you’ll learn about shared resources, Workgroups, Domains, and sharing printers.
In Windows, when you want to create access to a file or a folder that can be available across the network, we refer to that as a Windows share. You are sharing that information, and it could be a file, a folder, a printer, or any other resource that you can access across the network. If you want to access a share that’s on another computer on this network, you would map a drive letter to that share. You’ll find the option to map that drive from inside a File Explorer.
You can also map this drive from the command line using the net use command. File Explorer will show you all of the shares available on a remote device, but if you would like to administratively hide that share from the rest of the network, you simply include a dollar sign at the end of the share name. So a share such as ADMIN$ is a share that exists on this computer, and the share name is ADMIN. But if you look at it inside the Windows user interface, that share will not appear on a list of available shares on that computer.
This does not prevent somebody from accessing that share if they know the name, but it does prevent it from showing up in a pulldown menu. And if you would like to see all of the shares that have been configured on a local machine, you can do this from the Computer Management utility under the Shared Folders option, and it will list all the shares on that device.
Here’s File Explorer on my computer. You can see I have a number of devices and drives that are mapped. Some are local on this machine, such as my C drive and my D drive. But notice that I do have three network locations that are labeled as X drive, a Y drive, and a Z drive. To connect to another share on the network, you can use the three dots at the top, and use the option to map a network drive.
This will bring up a dialog box that allows us to specify what drive letter we would like to use. I have a lot of available drive letters that I could specify, and then you can either browse the network to see what shares might be available on another device. Or if you know the folder name, you can specify it inside of this dialog box. You can choose the option to reconnect to that share each time you sign in, and you can also connect using a different set of credentials than what you are currently signed in as on the current machine.
And once you’ve finished using that drive, you can use those three dots again and choose to disconnect that network drive from your File Explorer. With all of these different devices sharing folders and files and having printers available across the network, we need to think about how to secure all of these devices, and we also need to think about how to organize all of these devices. If you’re on a network at home, you can collect all of your devices together into one logical group known as a Windows workgroup.
Every device is a standalone system, but you can connect them all together to have a single name or a single logical description. But everybody in that workgroup maintains their own set of usernames and passwords. This means that a username and password you would use to connect to a printer on one device might be different than the username and password that you use to share a drive on a different device. This can really complicate the process of keeping track of usernames, passwords, and other credentials.
To be able to consolidate everything into one single group of credentials, you might want to use a Windows domain. This is the common configuration for a business or enterprise, where they want to consolidate all of these usernames, all of the devices, and all of the available resources into one single view. This means you only need to remember one set of user credentials, and you don’t need to have a different login for every individual device on the corporate network.
This also means that your IT support team can go to one central place to manage all of these users and all of these devices, which is incredibly useful when you have hundreds or even thousands of devices that you need to manage. You can view information about workgroups and domains from the System applet. You can access that applet from the Windows Settings or from the Control Panel. This will show you all of the configurations for this device, including the device name, and it will tell you if this device is connected to a Windows workgroup or if it’s in a Windows domain. You can choose the option for domain or workgroup to get more information about its current settings.
Here’s my Windows settings. I’ve selected the System category. And you can see under the About option, I have a listing of what this device is set to. But if I click domain or workgroup, it will pull up a separate window that shows me information about the computer name and what domain or workgroup this might be connected to. If I want to change the name of this device or connect to a different domain or a different workgroup, I can specify that by clicking the change option, changing the name of the device, or perhaps moving it from a domain to a workgroup, or modify information about the domain that it’s currently connected to.
Later on in this training course, we’ll talk more about Active Directory and how these domains can help you manage the process. For the meantime, keep in mind that all of this information is stored in a central distributed database on your network, described as an Active Directory Domain Services database. You often see this used in a business or an enterprise. But because it requires a separate server, we don’t often see Active Directory or Domain Services being used in a home environment.
If you are in a business environment, then you’re usually connecting to this Windows domain, and you’re using that as your central administration point. So when you need to add a new user or remove a user from the network, it’s all done inside of Active Directory. These directory services also allow us to set policies for all of these users and all of these devices. So if you need to make changes to Windows configuration inside of a user’s laptop, you can do that centrally using Active Directory.
If you’d like to connect a computer to this Active Directory network, we first need to make sure that we’re using the right edition of Windows. We can’t connect Windows to Active Directory if we’re using the Home edition of Windows 10 or Windows 11. We need to make sure that we’re using the Pro edition or better. Under the Control Panel, we can choose the System option, or if we’re using Windows Settings, we can simply use the System category and choose the About option.
From inside of that view, we can choose to connect to a domain or a workgroup, and we’ll need to make sure that we have the proper credentials to be able to add this device to our Active Directory domain. Once we click domain or workgroup, it will bring up a dialog box that shows us that computer name and what workgroup it might be connected to. But in this case, we would like to move it from the workgroup that it’s currently on to a domain.
So we’ll choose to change this information. And it will ask us to input the credentials required to connect to this Active Directory domain. Once our username and password is added and we’ve added the domain name, we can click Next, and it will connect this computer to the domain. From that point on, anytime someone logs in, they’ll be logging in with the centralized Active Directory domain credentials.
If your Windows computer is physically connected to a printer, you have the option of sharing that printer to everybody else who’s on the network. You can do this very easily inside of your printer properties or inside of the Windows settings. You can choose Bluetooth and Devices, and then choose the option under the printer to configure the printer properties. On my network, I have a number of different printers configured, but I’d like to share this Brother printer that’s at the top of the list.
If we’d like to share this printer, we can select the printer properties. This will bring up a separate dialog box for the properties. And within this dialog box, there’s a tab for Sharing. Here, you can choose to share the printer. You can select the name of the printer. And if someone now wants to connect to this printer, all you have to do is make sure that’s checked, click OK, and now your printer is available on the network.