Linking a UNC / Network drive on an html page

Setup IIS on the network server and change the path to http://server/path/to/file.txt

EDIT: Make sure you enable directory browsing in IIS

Alternative (Insert tooltip to user):

<style>
    a.tooltips {
        position: relative;
        display: inline;
    }
    a.tooltips span {
        position: absolute;
        width: 240px;
        color: #FFFFFF;
        background: #000000;
        height: 30px;
        line-height: 30px;
        text-align: center;
        visibility: hidden;
        border-radius: 6px;
    }
    a.tooltips span:after {
        content: '';
        position: absolute;
        top: 100%;
        left: 50%;
        margin-left: -8px;
        width: 0;
        height: 0;
        border-top: 8px solid #000000;
        border-right: 8px solid transparent;
        border-left: 8px solid transparent;
    }
    a:hover.tooltips span {
        visibility: visible;
        opacity: 0.8;
        bottom: 30px;
        left: 50%;
        margin-left: -76px;
        z-index: 999;
    }
</style>
<a class="tooltips" href="#">\\server\share\docs<span>Copy link and open in Explorer</span></a>

To link to a UNC path from an HTML document, use file:///// (yes, that's five slashes).

file://///server/path/to/file.txt

Note that this is most useful in IE and Outlook/Word. It won't work in Chrome or Firefox, intentionally - the link will fail silently. Some words from the Mozilla team:

For security purposes, Mozilla applications block links to local files (and directories) from remote files.

And less directly, from Google:

Firefox and Chrome doesn't open "file://" links from pages that originated from outside the local machine. This is a design decision made by those browsers to improve security.

The Mozilla article includes a set of client settings you can use to override this behavior in Firefox, and there are extensions for both browsers to override this restriction.