How do I get started as a Dropbox admin?
Ready to set up your team’s Dropbox team account? Get started with these steps.
11 minute read
Unlock easy deployment
As a Dropbox team admin, you have a lot of responsibility, like getting your team set up. It’s easy to do with the admin console.
Start with Settings
If you’ve looked around the admin console, you may have noticed that there are a lot of options to explore in the Settings page.
This section contains the bulk of what you can do as a Dropbox admin, from adjusting your team account information, controlling authentication and password settings, and managing devices, permissions, and content, just to name a few.
So now’s a good time to match up your organizational security policies against our console’s controls. Customers usually find value in tackling three common settings:
Web session control
Web session control helps safeguard access to organization data by allowing admins to control how long team members can be logged into dropbox.com. For example, an admin can set it so that the user is logged out after 1 week, or after 48 straight hours of inactivity.
Device limitations
If you don’t want your team members to access both a personal and a work Dropbox account on their computers via the desktop app, you can choose to allow only a single account on each computer.
Sharing outside the team
This setting controls whether team members can invite people outside the team to view or edit files and folders. The setting can allow full sharing (any email/email domain), no sharing outside the team, or an in-between of sharing with the team, plus approved outsiders (by email or email domain).
You can also set up early access to some of Dropbox’s newest features and configure other tools like Paper or Microsoft Office add-ins.
Want to take a tour of the Admin Console? Watch our Admin console tutorial.
Deployment and domain management
Now that you know where you can configure your settings, you’re ready to verify your domain and get deployment underway.
Domain verification allows certain types of admins to verify the ownership of an email domain with Dropbox.
Note: Domain verification is available to Dropbox teams on an Advanced, Business Plus, or Enterprise plan.
Invite enforcement
If you have an Advanced, Business Plus, or Enterprise plan, combining domain verification with invite enforcement helps make adding new team members easier and faster.
Why set up invite enforcement? Because it helps prevent unauthorized Dropbox use on a company domain by requiring invited users to choose what they want to do with the data in their existing basic account.
Enabling this feature will cause all future invites on your domain to be enforced, which means users will need to choose what they want to do with data in their existing accounts and grants admins additional control over any unmanaged users.
If you do choose to enable invite enforcement, keep in mind that it will only affect invites sent after the feature is turned on.
If an invited user is already on a personal account with your company domain, their account will stop syncing until they choose what to do with their data. If they choose to keep their account personal, Dropbox will make them a brand new empty work account!
Want to configure invite enforcement? It’s easy.
Go to the admin console.
Click Settings.
Scroll down to the Members section.
Select Domains.
From the verified domain you can enable invite enforcement by clicking Invited users.
Account capture
There’s another Enterprise-only feature that helps prevent unauthorized usage on a company domain. It's called account capture.
Check our dedicated Account Capture module to learn more.
Note: Account capture is available to Dropbox teams on an Enterprise plan.
How to get started as a Dropbox admin
Take a look at these tutorials if you’re looking for more ways to streamline getting started as an admin.
Tour the admin console
Whether you’re new to the admin console, or you just haven’t visited it in a long time, it’s always helpful to get a tour. No matter the size of your team, you’ll find plenty of tools here to make your life easier.
Click play to take the tour now.
Verifying your domain
Want to know how to verify your organization's domain?
Watch this video to learn more.
How to configure early access
Want to give your team access to Dropbox’s newest features before they’re rolled out for everyone else?
Watch this video to learn more.
Configure your admin console
Try out these actions when you set up your own admin console. Each one starts in the Settings tab.
Add members to your team
Now that your settings align with your organization's security policies, it’s time to add members to your team.
Admins can invite people individually with an email, or in bulk with a CSV file.
For an even more streamlined approach, an admin can automatically invite members using the Dropbox Active Directory (AD) Connector.
Read more about how a small business uses these tools to get up and running with Dropbox.