Windows Explorer View Not Working on One Site Collection

Question

We have had some end users run into this problem recently and having exhausted all possible troubleshooting I figured I would post on here to see if anyone has encountered this before or knows what’s going on.

For certain users we have an issue where Explorer View does not work for them. When they try to access it they get the error below:

Documents in this folder are not available. The folder may have been moved or deleted, or network problems may be preventing a connection to the server.

Server error: The URL https://[site]/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll is not contained within a Windows SharePoint Services site.

I have tried numerous solutions to try and resolve the error but nothing seems to work. Some more info:

• SharePoint 2010 (recently upgraded from SharePoint 2007 – Same SQL server, new WFEs)
• WebDAV Publishing is NOT enabled on any of the WFEs
• WebClient service on client PC is not the issue (Started on all client machines for both users that have an issue and users that do not)
• Worked previously in SharePoint 2007 prior to upgrading Does not affect all users, only some users have this issue
• They only have this issue on this specific web application. Tried other sites within different web apps and it works correctly.
• The web application contains only a single site collection which is the root site collection so having no root site collection existing is not the issue.
• Managed Paths are not used
• Some users also have an issue where rather than the error above they get the “Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer” intermittently
• This only seems to happen to off-network users connecting through an ISA 2007, or through a specific firewall to firewall trust in place with an off-network group of users

If any additional info is needed just let me know and I'd be happy to provide it. Thanks in advance for the help!

Answer 1

If I remember correctly that vti folder might not be included in the ISA/TMG server rules if you used the SharePoint web listener wizard to create the rule, run the checks on the ISA/TMG server rule test or just set the paths to / /* (so just the wildcard path).

And since you mention this is a migration you're probably using the old 2007 rule which does have a different vti virtual directory I think.

Answer 2

Explorer Viewer will not work in any browsers besides IE 7+. IE version must be the 32-bit version.