First to explain:
We have a search engine that indexes file servers as well as intranet web pages. The results were designed with windows in mind:
Web links work in both windows and Linux.
But file links (i.e. file:////someserver/share/../.. ) obvoiusly don't work in Linux.

Is there anyway to allow linux to convert \\server\share to smb://server/share?
Is there another solution I'm not thinking of?

We want to actively move users to Linux Desktops, but this is one of the stumbling blocks holding us up.

Thanks
Bob

Well, it may sound like a boil-the-ocean solution, but you should probably look at killing file shares wherever possible (regardless of the desktop OS). Ideally you should only use file sharing technologies like CIFS/Windows File Sharing for cases where multiple users must be able to write to a single instance of a file, and use HTTP for pretty much everything else. A lot of people must have access to many documents, but should only have write access to the master copies of few.

I suspect that you could hack something with automount on Linux to have mount points that access the file servers, so that when a user tries file:///server/share, the automounter provides a directory with the name of the server and a subdirectory that matches the share (accessing the remote server behind the scenes).