Contribute and Drive Shares intranet problem

Question

So we use contribute for our company's external sites and it
works well.
However, I would also like to use it on our intranet. Heres
the rub..
when I test it, it works fine. Why? Because I have acceess to
web root on our intranet dev/staging server. So my copy of
Contribute can put files to it and test it, and work.
However, IT does NOT want to give anyone else access to web
root on the dev server. Instead, they give them a drive share that
looks at a specific folder.
And Contribute does NOT like that at all.
Obviously this is a problem compounded by the fact that I
have less than a novice understanding of drive shares and windows
networking.
Someone else MUST have encountered this problem.

Answer 1

We use it for our intranet. Users have the following
permissions:
Read only to the web root and Templates folder (necessary for
setting up the site and using templates).
Read/Modify to _mm and MMWip at the root level (necessary for
Contribute temp files).
Read/Modify to their individual folder under the web root.
This works for us.