Hi Tom,
Currently File Explorer does not provide direct access to network resources. However, you can mount your network drive (or a directory on it) on your local filesystem. In this way File Explorer will give you access to the mounted resource, just as a regular folder. We do this all the time and works perfectly.
On Windows, you can simply
create a shortcut to your network drive (this is called "mapping" on Windows 10, but works the same). On Linux/UNIX operating systems, network resources can be
mounted on the local filesystem tree very easily with the
mount command. On OS X, you can also
map a network drive to a folder on your desktop using the graphical user interface.