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Enhanced Sharing Settings and External Sharing View

Explore how Dropbox admins have access to advanced security features that allow them to view team activity and manage external sharing permissions. This ensures files and folders are shared securely to members outside of their team.

How to view and set team sharing permissions

On the left-hand side, when you, as an admin, click into the admin console, you'll see that there's a security section here. Within that security section, depending on which SKU you're on, you will see an external sharing option.

This activity console will share any externally shared information that you have on your teams. You can be very specific with what you're looking for. You can choose a date range, for example, first of all. So if I go back to April,

You can then search by an individual using a name or an email address here or who it was shared with or even better, a domain perhaps. And then we can also look at who, or what kind of settings they had on there. So, for example, if I search for an individual, just going to use myself for this example.

And then we can see here we've got links. So was it password-protected? Was there no password on it? Does it have an expiry date on it? Do we want to allow has it allowed downloading or not? What kind of file type is it? So we can see here various different office documents. What kind of access does it have? Is it view or edit, for example? So we can get very granular with what we're looking for just to see if something has been shared. And if it has, has it got the right protection here, perhaps passwords or something you want to have as a requirement for certain files? And if you can see that it hasn't been, it might be an educational opportunity for you to go and contact those team members.

So we can see here, badlands as a video. And then if you want, you can also go and see all files shared by an individual here with this quick access.

On the other side, we have inside the settings admin console first, then go to settings. And if you continue to scroll down, you will eventually come to the sharing settings. These haven't been updated in quite some time, but recently we've made some changes here.

Here, you can set the access, whether you want this shared for anyone on your team. So this is external sharing. Do you want only your team, but some approved people, or do you want to have it off so it's only your team can collaborate with each other with shared folders?

As we scroll down, some of these have existed for a while, but you can see now that it says default shared link policy. We can change this from team only to anyone that has existed beforehand. I recommend keeping this on team only first so that individuals have to explicitly share information externally.

But what we haven't had before until now is, do we want to set an expiration on these links that are created and are shared outside your team? So you can choose from one of these defaults here. At the moment, it's set to seven days. But if you trust your employees at a certain level, you can allow them also to override these so certain individuals may need links that last for much longer than a year because they work with these partners on a regular basis. So you can allow those individuals, or this is a team-wide setting, to override this seven-day limit that is automatically applied to links. Finally, if you want to be a little bit more aggressive, you could also require a password for all links shared externally via this button. So those are two sections within the admin console, which I wanted to highlight to you. Again, please go to help.dropbox.com to search for these features to get a run-through.

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