How do I control my team’s access to Dropbox?

No matter how big your team is, as a Dropbox team admin you have plenty of options for managing Dropbox access.

13 minute read

Managing made easy

Whether you’re adding or removing members of your team, Dropbox team accounts make user management easy.

Managing members vs. groups

If you have a big team, creating groups is a great way to organize your team members. Knowing how to manage individual members and groups from the admin console will help you stay organized.

Know your group types

There are two types of groups you can use.

Company-managed groups can only be created by admins, and team members can’t voluntarily join or leave those groups.

User-managed groups are enabled by default and can be created by admins and team members. People can request to join or voluntarily leave the groups. Admins can disable user-managed groups through the admin console or change a user-managed group to a company-managed group, when you want to take control of it.

Manage members

When it comes to managing the members of your Dropbox team account, you have several controls available. You can: reset passwords, suspend or delete users, and view individual activity logs.

To do so, click the Members tab in the Admin Console.

See what everyone’s up to

As an admin, the activity log is your new best friend. From here, you can see what is happening across all users on your account. This includes when, what, and with whom your users share, when they log into their accounts or change their passwords, and when they've linked third-party apps or new devices. It also lets you see whenever a user is added to or removed from the team.

To access activity logs, click the Activity tab in the admin console.

Manage groups

Groups allow you to create lists of people who should have access to the same files and folders. It’s especially helpful if you want to organize team members by department or function.

What are some of the benefits of groups? They allow you to share folders instantly with the entire group, and you can specify whether that group has edit or view-only access.

To create and edit groups, go to the Groups tab in the admin console.

Know your group types

There are two types of groups you can use.

Company-managed groups can only be created by admins, and team members can’t voluntarily join or leave those groups.

See what everyone’s up to

To access activity logs, click the Activity tab in the admin console.

Manage groups

Groups allow you to create lists of people who should have access to the same files and folders. It’s especially helpful if you want to organize team members by department or function.

What are some of the benefits of groups? They allow you to share folders instantly with the entire group, and you can specify whether that group has edit or view-only access.

To create and edit groups, go to the Groups tab in the admin console.

Know your group types

There are two types of groups you can use.

Company-managed groups can only be created by admins, and team members can’t voluntarily join or leave those groups.

Get everyone on board

If you use Active Directory (AD), you can use the Dropbox AD Connector to quickly provision users.

For a more in-depth look, check out this help article. Note: the Dropbox AD Connector is available to Dropbox teams on an Advanced or Enterprise plan.

Do you use Active Directory? Great! You can use the Dropbox AD Connector to easily provision, de-provision, and manage users and groups in Dropbox.

The AD Connector works like a mirror, which reflects changes in your AD to your Dropbox. We call this one-way sync, but know that the AD Connector will never actually alter files or content in a Dropbox account.

Here’s a tip: set up a user sync and a separate group sync when you set up your AD with Dropbox. This will offer you more flexibility when it comes to provisioning users.

With Dropbox, there are many ways to provision users, in addition to the AD Connector, such as the admin console and IAM/IdP. Choose what’s best for you (and know that some of these methods require a little bit of technical knowledge, too).

Identify yourself

You may want to connect your Dropbox account to an identity management provider if you already use one, or if you have a complex, multi-forest Active Directory.

Note: Single sign-on (SSO) is available to Dropbox teams on an Advanced or Enterprise plan.

Identity managers (IDMs)

Identity management offers admins a robust set of tools designed to simplify user lifecycle operations including creating and removing Dropbox accounts.

Take a look at this help article to learn which identity providers offer preconfigured settings for Dropbox.

Single sign-on (SSO)

SSO lets your team access Dropbox by signing in to a central identity provider. This makes life easier for your users—it gives them one less password to remember. If you’re already using an identity provider you trust and one that Dropbox supports, setting this up is easy. If you also manage SSO with your Cloud IDM, you can easily manage everything with your IDM provider.

Suspend user and remote wipe

Sometimes you need to remove a user’s access to your Dropbox team. We have two ways to let you do that, both of which can be accessed from the admin console.

Suspend users

Suspending a user means that they will instantly lose access to their Dropbox team account and Paper docs. They can only get back in when an admin chooses to remove the suspension.

Suspending an account doesn’t free up a license, though. The account still exists, which means it’s still using that license. To free up the license, you’ll need to delete the account.

Remote wipe

Remote wipe lets you delete a Dropbox team account from a team member’s linked devices. With this feature, you stay in charge of managing data on every device that it’s accessed from, and it’s perfect to use if one of your team members loses a device.

Once you unlink a device and use remote wipe, that device will immediately stop syncing.

Wait, don’t go!

Did you accidentally remove a team member? Didn’t mean to delete someone? No problem!

Dropbox team admins have seven days to restore any deleted users. Restoring a user reactivates their account with the exact same files and permissions.

It’s like nothing even happened.

How to merge Dropbox teams

If there’s more than one Dropbox team in your organization, or maybe you’re working closely with another team, you might want to merge these two separate teams into one.

One of my team members already has a Dropbox account. How do I add them into my Dropbox team account?

Invite your team member as you would any new member. If they choose to join the team, then they’ll be prompted to decide what they want to do with their existing files: merge their files with the Dropbox team account or create a separate personal Dropbox account for their files. Also, keep in mind that if that team member is part of an existing Dropbox team, they can’t join a second team.