Hello all. I'm glad I found this thread because I have a similar set up and I'm also a Mac newbie, so I'm looking for help.
In my house, I have a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essential set up that hosts all my photo, videos, media on various shared folders. We just got our first Mac yesterday (Mac Mini) and I'm trying to configure it so it can see the various shared folders on the windows server.
I did find a way to connect to a server via SMB but I'm not sure if that's the right way to do it. In Windows, I would mount a drive to each shared folder that I want and assign it a drive letter. P:\ for photos, V:\ for videos, etc. Since in Mac, there's no drives to assign, I'm kind of at a lost as to how to set things up. What I want in the end is for the user to be able to access those shared drives by opening Finder and seeing it listed on the left side.
Can someone point me to instructions/tutorial or explain what the proper way to achieve this?
And thanks Sleepwalker65 for posting about the registry fix. Once I get things set up properly I will have to check if the shares are being dropped when the Mac is idle.