Overview of Internet Information Services 5.0

WebDAV

WebDAV is an extension of the HTTP 1.1 standard for exposing a hierarchical file storage media, such as a file system, over an HTTP connection. With WebDAV you can control how remote authors access resources on the file system by letting them edit, move, search, or delete files and directories, and their properties, on a Web server. You can configure a WebDAV virtual directory’s permissions to:

Search for directories, files, and their properties.
Create, modify, and delete directories, files, and their properties.
Create, modify, delete, and browse directories and their properties.
Store and retrieve custom properties for files and directories.
Lock files so that multiple users can read a file concurrently, but only one individual can modify it.

For details about setting WebDAV permissions, see the “Setting Web Server Permissions” topic in the IIS 5.0 online product documentation.

The advantage of using WebDAV is its interoperability. For example, a client can connect to a WebDAV server from a Macintosh or UNIX client computer. Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) connections, on the other hand, do not offer this flexibility.