When I started teaching in 2004, most of the machines (read as PC units) we used in school run on Windows XP already. It was during this time that the Network Administrator of the school decided to keep the FTP port closed in all of the multimedia labs (good thing he was replaced already; such a pain in the a#*). Imagine how tormenting it was to upload an entire website using cPanel’s File Manager.

So, I decided to teach my students then a work-around that will somewhat enable them to FTP using a Windows XP-based machine: Network Places.

When Windows Vista, and later Windows 7, were introduced, Network Places was scrapped out. Then, I came across this nifty utility called Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop allows you to map a cloud storage (that includes Google Docs & Windows Live SkyDrive) or any FTP location as a virtual network drive. Using Gladinet Cloud Desktop doesn’t require for a separate FTP client software to be installed in your machine, since you can tap the features of Windows Explorer to cut, copy, and paste files and folders from your PC to a remote location/server storage.