Important: Contact Your Administrator Before Setup Whether and to what extent you can use file sharing and network browsing and in your network highly depends on the network structure and on the configuration of your machine.
Before setting up either of them, contact your system administrator. Check whether your network structure supports a feature and whether your company's security policies permit it.
Network browsing, be it SMB browsing for Windows shares or SLP browsing for remote services, relies heavily on the machine's ability to send broadcast messages to all clients in the network. These messages and the clients' replies to them enable your machine to detect any available shares or services.
For broadcasts to work effectively, your machine must be part of the same subnet as all other machines it is querying. If network browsing does not work on your machine or the detected shares and services do not meet your expectations, contact your system administrator to ensure that you are connected to the appropriate subnet.
To allow network browsing, your machine needs to keep several network ports open to send and receive network messages that provide details on the network and the availability of shares and services.
To adjust the firewall configuration, you either need to ask your system administrator to put your interface into the internal zone or to disable the firewall entirely (depending on your company's security policy). If you try to browse a network while a restrictive firewall is running on your machine, GNOME Files warns you that your security restrictions are not allowing it to query the network.