The SmartVault Drive allows you to map a drive letter on your local computer to the SmartVault portal. Once you map a SmartVault Drive, you can access and edit files stored on the SmartVault portal as easily as you access and open files on your local computer.

For example, you can use the SmartVault drive to open, view, edit, and save files stored on the SmartVault portal using Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel just as you would work with these files on your local computer. You can also use the SmartVault Drive to drag and drop files between your local computer and the SmartVault portal.

Last but not least, you can use the SmartVault Drive to help you quickly and easily create the folder and subfolder structure you want to use to store documents in your portal, as well as create and deploy folder and subfolder templates you can use with your clients and other users to help you consistently store and manage data in your SmartVault portal.

If you are working in a hosted environment, most hosting environments do not allow you to map a drive in your hosted environment. This is not a technical limitation of SmartVault, but rather is a limitation sometimes imposed by hosting providers. However, even if your hosting provider will not allow you to map a SmartVault Drive in your hosting environment, you can still map and use a SmartVault drive on your local computer. When you use the SmartVault Drive on your local computer, any changes you make to documents or your vault or folder structure using the SmartVault Drive on your local computer are automatically available in your SmartVault portal and accessible when you work in your hosted environment and use the SmartVault Toolbar and SmartVault Inbox.

The process for mapping a drive is simple, but the procedure you use to map a SmartVault Drive varies based on the type of operating system running on your computer. For more information about how to map a SmartVault Drive, see the following topics:

If your computer is running one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems and one of the versions of Microsoft Office, which includes popular Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, there are also some differences in how you can use your SmartVault Drive based on the combination of Microsoft operating system version and Microsoft Office version you use.

You can view, edit, and save documents stored in the SmartVault portal using the SmartVault Drive, such as Microsoft Word and Excel documents and PDF files, just as you would on your local computer if you use the following Microsoft operating system and Microsoft Office combinations:

You can view documents stored in the SmartVault portal using the SmartVault Drive just as you would on your local computer, but if you want to edit and then save a document using the SmartVault Drive, such as a Microsoft Word or Excel documents or a PDF file, you must save your edited document with a different name if you use the following Microsoft operating system and Microsoft Office combinations:

These differences in behavior are due to differences in the way Microsoft uses the Web-Based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol in its Windows operating systems. For more information, see “Additional Technical Details About the SmartVault Drive in Microsoft Environments” .

If you move a document from one folder to another in the SmartVault Drive, document Create and Modify dates and times remain the same. However, if you copy and paste a document from one folder in the SmartVault Drive to a different folder in the SmartVault Drive, Create and Modify dates are reset to the current time. Document Create and Modify dates and times are also reset to the current time when you move or copy and paste a document from a folder on your local computer or on a network drive into a folder on the SmartVault Drive.