There is something that has always annoyed me about the way windows shares are displayed to a user – they get to see all of them!

Yes I know about putting a $ after the share, such as c$, or admin$, but what about those shares that the president of the company wants to have – and doesn’t want his employees to even know that they exist?

Finally Microsoft has put out a utility to fix this. It is called “Access-based Enumeration”. It is only available for Windows 2003 SP1

The offical download page is located here:
Microsoft Access-Based Enumeration

Once you start the install, you get asked a simple question:

If you select all, then access based enumeration will be enabled for all current shares on the system – otherwise you will need to set them each individually.

Once the install is finished, a new tab appears when looking at the properties of a share:

Thats all there is! You can either turn it on or off.

Too bad they don’t have this type of functionality for 2000, or 2003 without SP!