Comment 3 for bug 574046

I was actually wondering where shares-admin went and after a few days of Googling I found your post. I actually though I was the only one having this problem.

I think its an outstanding bug. This used to work out of the box before but it seems that development is not going to continue on the direction of shares-admin since the next update of XFCE 4.8 (hopefully this june according to the xfce website) especially thunar will have network shares built in. This might be the reason for excluding shares-admin from the system menu but still exists for transition purposes.

Shared-folders will actually install the needed files and programs but because of the bug it will only allow you to create the workgroup name which will be written/saved to the SAMBA configuration file located in "/etc/samba/samba.conf". Sharing actual folders does not seem to work. To share folders you have manually write and save the configuration to samba.conf. You can use and edit the CDROM example in that files to create your own read only configuration setting. For more configuration setting visit the official samba site at http://www.samba.org.

Meanwhile to fill in the gap of actually browsing the network shares in thunar until 4.8, a combination of Gigolo and gvfs-fuse will do the trick. Access the shares via Gigolo and gvfs-fuse will open the share in thunar. Installation of gvs-fuse is required,after that a restart and then browse away. File operations depend on sharing permission settings via Samba. This is actually the next best thing to native file-share browsing as provided by gnome or kde.