How to Publish a Shared Folder on Active Directory in Windows Server 2003?

Publishing a shared folder means that a folder which is already shared somewhere in your network will be published in active directory. This will help users to locate the shared folder searching it directly through active directory database. This feature eliminates the requirement of remembering the network path of the shared folder which can be present on anywhere in the network. Also with the help of this feature users need not to type the entire network path every time they want to access the shared folder. Moreover this published shared folder can be searched with the help of keywords which are defined while publishing it. This broadens the scope of the search process initiated by the users. You can publish a shared folder by following the steps given below:

1. Log on to the domain controller with administrator privileges.
2. Click on Start button.
3. From the start menu go to Administrative Tools and from the submenu click on Active Directory Users and Computers.
4. From Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in right click on the domain name which in this case is TESTDOMAIN.COM.
5. From the context menu go to New and from the submenu click on Shared Folder.
6. On New Object-Shared Folder page in the Name text box type the name of the folder by which you want the folder to be published in the active directory.
7. On the same page in Network path (\servershare) text box type the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path of the shared folder which you want to publish in the active directory and click on Ok button.
8. Back on Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in click on the domain name to select it.
9. From the right pane right click on the shared folder you have just published and click on Properties.
10. On the Properties page make sure that you are on General tab and click on Keywords button.
11. On the Keywords box type the keywords which are related to the shared folder in New Value text box and click on Add button to add the value. You can add as many keywords as you want and once done click on Ok button.
12. 
13. Back on Properties box click on Ok button to accept and confirm your selection.

You can now educate users to search for the specified keywords in Active Directory whenever they want to access the published shared folder. Alternatively they can map this published shared folder to their local computers to eliminate the need of searching this shared folder every time they want to access it.