The Common Internet File System (CIFS) also known as Server
Message Block (SMB) is a network protocol whose most common use
is sharing files on a LAN. The protocol allows a client to
access servers, files and printers on the LAN as though they
were on the local machine. Microsoft uses CIFS in all flavours
of Windows to provide it's networking capabilities i.e. Shares,
Network Neighbourhood. Unix/Linux also use CIFS via Samba and
Apple has several clients and servers available, thus it's a
fairly interopable protocol. CIFS has a client and a server
part. The server is probably more applicable to us as we could
expose the repository as a CIFS server. This would theoretically
mean that the repository would show up in the Network
Neighbourhood and users would be able to map the repository as a
normal Windows drive letter. The client capabilities may also be
useful as we could import content from an existing network
share, for example. There is an open source implementation of a
CIFS client called jCIFS. The clien