When do you need Network Drive Manager?

Network Drive Manager is a utility for managing network drives, which brings added value to users that access network drives in a computer network, ranging from small home networks to large corporate networks.
During Windows logon it ensures that all network drives under control of NDM get connected and activated, where after they are kept alive to prevent deactivation.
In case network resources are not (yet) available or if the connection with a network drive is lost, NDM alerts the user and actively attempts to reconnect the network drives.
Optionally it can mount TrueCrypt volumes, run programs or open documents when a network drive has been successfully connected.


What's wrong with mapping network drives in Windows?

Windows does not properly reconnect network drives after logon that have been configured using Map Network Drive in Windows Explorer with the "Reconnect at logon" feature checked. Although they're visible in Windows Explorer, they are usually not activated.
This causes problems when e.g. a network drive is used as a central location to store documents and/or settings. Applications that use these centrally stored files will complain or even fail to start because the network location is not accessible.
Even if the network drive would have been reconnected properly, the other problem is that Windows deactivates network drives (i.e. make it inaccessible) if they’re not accessed for a while. This again results in complaining applications since they're not able to flush their data to disk, and sometimes it even ends up in data loss for those applications that don’t anticipate on these possible failures.