Today I visited a client that has built a simple windows application, that works with files from SharePoint based on their UNC. (something like \\mySharePoint\MySite\MyDocLib\MyDoc.docx)
Everything worked fine until he tried to work with another web application that’s on port 82.
You would presume that changing the UNC path to \\mySharePoint:81\MySite\MyDocLib\MyDoc.docx will do the trick.. But no. It appears that UNC access and drive mapping are one of the features that’s exclusive to the WebDav protocol.
Now let’s take a step back:
Explorer view is the feature that lets you work with documents in a SharePoint document library with a windows explorer like experience.
Explorer view works in 2 different methods (or protocols, for that matter): FPRPC, and WebDav.
WebDav is more modern and is recommended for most uses. What matters to us was it’s native support for UNC access.
The problem with WebDav, is that is doesn’t work on any port other that 80!
So to work around our issue, we have enabled access to the site from a different address (that’s on port 80), and by that, forced WebDav over FPRPC.
To do that, we can create an alternated access mapping for the specified web app that’s on port 82. The new AAM has an address of port 80. Than, configure DNS and include the new host.