Important Note
You must purchase a license for each SharePoint Front-End Web Server you have is your farm. The SharePoint Zip Installer will not install the product unless you buy the correct number of licenses.

If you are installing into more than one SharePoint Farm, you must purchase new licenses for each SharePoint Front-End Web Server in the additional SharePoint Farm.



Background
SharePoint provides a great web-based user interface that allows a user to easily upload or download files, as long as the user is working with one file at a time. It would be really nice if users could download an entire set of files in one shot, or upload a set of files.

The Problem
There are approaches out there, but most require installing a client-side application like SharePoint Designer 2007 or using the SharePoint file upload ActiveX control, which does not allow uploading files from multiple folders at once. While these approaches may be OK for intranet portals is not ideal for extranet or Internet SharePoint deployments.

A Simple Solution
Use Zip files. Zip files allow users to package multiple files and folders into a single file and then unpack the contents later. Most desktop and laptop computers are able to work with Zip files. SharePoint Zip allows users to upload a single Zip file into a SharePoint document library, and tell SharePoint to unzip the contents of the file after the upload has completed. This not only makes the upload simple, only one file is sent to SharePoint, but also the contents of the Zip file are compressed, saving valuable upload time and bandwidth. Downloading is just as easy. Users select a file, folder, or entire document library, and SharePoint sends the contents as a single Zip file. This saves considerable time and bandwidth during the download, and it lets users download many files and folders with a single click.