Author:  Eric Vasbinder

ERPs Applicable

• Vista (VEC RDP, VFC, and VRL / AVD)

• ProContractor (PCC and VFC)

Overview

Viewpoint Enterprise Cloud (VEC) is Viewpoint’s premiere technology for hosting of our ERP applications and associated solutions.  It is a powerful and high-performance solution that can dramatically improve the experience for users of our solutions.  For hosting our Vista product in VEC, Viewpoint makes use of the robust and capable Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol’s (RDP) published apps mechanism.

Remotely hosted applications in VEC include such applications as Outlook, Vista, Excel, and many more.  These applications are actually running on the remote system, hosted in Viewpoint’s VEC datacenter, though they appear as if they are running locally on the user’s local machine.  The caveat of this approach is that these remotely running programs cannot easily interact with the other programs on your computer.  For example, dragging and dropping files from your local desktop or file explorer on to a remotely published / hosted application is impossible.  As such, for Vista drag and drop to work, the user must make use of the remote file explorer, moving files via drag and drop from the user’s local laptop into the remote VEC environment.

To address the need to move files from a user’s local computer to a remotely hosted published application, RDP provides capabilities to make local files available in the remote file explorer by mapping your local and network drives into that remote file explorer.  For example, this “remote file explorer” in VEC shows two local hard drives, “C” and “F”.  These are not drives in the remote computer, but rather the user’s local laptop.

Figure 1:  Screenshot of mapped local drives

To get to your local files in VEC, the user needs to drill down into the “C” drive, or the “F” drive for a network share, eventually getting to the folder where the documents needed are located. 

Unfortunately, when accessing your local computer over a remote connection to VEC, the time it takes for this file folder list to populate and refresh can be unacceptable to some users.  Fortunately, though we cannot fight physics head on, we can at least avoid the need to perform this action as often - we have at least a partial solution.

A Partial Solution

Windows has a number of features with which users are often unfamiliar.  In this case, there is a feature in all modern versions of Windows that allows for users to map their local folders to new, specific drive letters that, in effect, act as shortcuts into areas that users access frequently in their daily jobs.  This can dramatically cut down on the amount of time needed to drill down to needed local files through VEC.

The command in question is the “subst” command, which can work either manually, or automatically upon login, to set up the shortcut to a local folder.  The following two sections enumerate how this is performed.

Manually setting up the Local Pointer Drives

To manually set up a directory as a mapped drive in Windows, using the subst command, the following steps should be used:

1.       Make certain you understand the number and organization of the folders that you would like to show as mapped drives in your VEC environment from your local machine.  For example, you could set up the mapped drives to be shortcuts to your AP invoices directory, your Downloads directory, and your “My Documents” directory.  This would enable you to quickly and easily get to those areas.

2.       Identify the directory you would like to have mapped to a drive in VEC.  In this example, I have chosen to link my directory of scanned AP invoices (“C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\AP\Scanned_Invoices”)  to a folder “I”.

3.       Next, you need to open a command prompt on your local computer.  To do so:

a.       Press the “Windows Key” and the R key together – this will display the run dialog box.

b.       In the run dialog box, type “cmd” and then press enter.

c.       The command prompt will appear. 

4.       In the command prompt, please type the following command:

subst MAPPEDDRIVELETTER: C:\DIRECTORY\PATH\TO\FOLDER

Then press enter.

See my example screenshot below for how I mapped my AP Scanned Invoices folder to the “I” drive letter.

Figure 2:  Mapping to the Scanned AP Invoices directly

5.       Note, though there will not be a message telling you that the previous step worked, you’ll be able to verify the success of the step by looking at your local file explorer to see if the new drive letter appears.

Figure 3:  Successful drive mapping

 6.       Once you have successfully mapped the drive, you can then use the VEC remote file explorer to click directly on the newly mapped “I” drive.  This will allow you to much more rapidly drill down into the specific folder in which you are interested.

Figure 4:  Viewing the new drive letter remotely

7.       The next step is to perform the action that you’d like to perform on the file that you want in the mapped drive:  e.g. drag the file that you want to use into the cloud “H” drive for sharing with other members of your team or drag it into a Vista record.

Now that we have completed setting up the mapped local drive for easy access of local files in VEC, the next step will most often be to set up the new drive mapping to happen automatically at boot time for ease of use.

Setting up Automatic Drive Mapping

Configuring the local computer to automatically map the directory into the drive letter that we want is a straightforward task, though it does require the use of the registry editor.  If you do not feel comfortable using the registry editor, please contact your IT administrator for assistance.

To set up automated mapping of a local directory to a drive letter, follow these steps:

1.        Start the registry editor application by pressing the Windows Key and the “R” key.

2.       Type “regedit” into the run dialog box and press enter.

3.       Your registry editor will start and ask for permission to make changes, please allow it to make changes by clicking “YES”.

4.       Once you have registry editor open, browse down the tree until you get to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

OR, if this computer is a multi-user computer and you wish for each user to have their own, different folders that are mapped to unique drive letters, you should browse down to this area:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

5.       Once you have browsed down to this area, you should right click on right hand pane or click “EDIT->NEW->String Value”.

6.       In the name column for your new registry key, you should type the name you wish to assign to your new key – it does not matter what it is; in my case, I chose “MountAPFolder”.

7.       Then double click on the new key that you have created and enter the text that you entered previously to map the drive manually.  See below for how my entry looks:

Figure 5: Key Value Entry

You have now successfully set up your computer to map a local directory to a drive letter.  This will make drilling down into to your local hard drives, or even your company’s network drives, much faster as you no longer need to wait for the left-hand pane to refresh over the RDP connection.