Something which has annoyed me for quite some time about OS X is how little control you get over SMB sharing (unless you run OS X server). I am generally a fan of Apple’s "keep it simple" approach but in this case they’ve gone too far and made it so simple as to deny ordinary users access to many features the underlying OS has. Well, the problem is now solved by some nice DonationWare utils form HownWare (www.hornware.com).

OS X contains a complete Samba Server and a complete Samba server and client but
unless you have OS X Server you only get very limited GUI access to these features. You can fully share your entire home dir to your username
and password and you can have a fully public folder called "Public" in
your home directory that everyone can see and that’s it. IMO that is
not good enough! If you are not afraid of the command line you can of
course set up your own shares manually, as I have done on some of my
Macs, but that is beyond the realms of the Ordinary user.

This is where HornWare come in with a nice set of utils. The best one IMO is SharePoints which gives you both a standalone app for managing all your SMB shares as well as a pane you can add to the system preferences app (OS X’s version of Windows’ Control Panel). This gives you all the control you could hope for and at first glance seems a nice app. Another very useful app is SharePoints Auto Mounter which allows you to set up finder to automatically connect to remote shares when you log in, ideal in a work situation where you want access to files on departmental shares etc..

Screenshot of SharePoints System Preferences Pane: