Add restrictions for files and folders naming on Windows

Question

Is it possible, with Windows Seven pro, to add restrictions on the naming for files and folders?

Let me explain:

My users can't refrain from using characters like é, ô, or string like l'agence ++.

They also call their files with very long strings, like 30 or 40 characters!

This cause me a lot of troubles, and I lost a lot of time fixing names due to encoding problems with some software, or worth, impossibility to delete or rename files because the NTFS Maximum Path Length Limitation of 260 charaters has been exceeded!

I would like to permit only:

• Alphanumeric characters, without diacritics [a-zA-Z0-9]
• dot (.), minus (-) and underscore (_)
• limit files and folders naming to 10 or 12 characters
• no spaces

Answer 1

Windows 7 has no features like that, but Windows 2008R2 has some. You can use File Screening to prevent any user to create certain file patterns on a disk. This will also work with users on a client PC that will create files on a Windows 2008R2 File share.

You can access the settings in File server resource manager (if installed).

I don't recommend setting the rules too tight though.