Team Folders

Team folders are one of the most important tools in Dropbox Business.

As an end user, I can see that I'm a member of two team folders in my Dropbox. And I can see those right here as indicated by these building icons.

Here, you can see I'm part of the engineering team folder and the sales team folder. Team folders are folders that are typically created by team admins and rolled out to their end users. The idea is that an admin can create these folders programmatically with whatever hierarchy and membership structure that they would like, and enroll them out to end users versus regular folders or regular shared folders that a user can create themselves and share with whoever they'd like.

So the core advantage of team folders is that they're created, owned, and managed by team admins. Team folders can often be compared to Windows network drives, and that's a comparison that'll make sense for customers coming from a more traditional Windows environment.

Team folders, like all Dropbox folders, are synced across all your devices. So you have web access, and then I can go to my desktop, and I can see those same two team folders, sales and engineering.

If I go to the admin console, I can navigate to the content tab and see and manage all my team folders that are created. Actually, go to this team in shared tab.

To create a team folder, I can click on the upper right. You can also set a sync default, so if an admin has a larger team folder, maybe they don't want it to automatically sync to a user's desktop, and you can enable or disable that right here.

Once I create that folder, I can add a group to it. And since this is a sales demo, I'll maybe add the sales group. And I'll give them edit access, and I'll click add. So I have my DBX sales demo, and I'll manage it.

And I can modify the settings of this folder with this gear icon. The folder membership is set to anyone. That means that potentially people outside of my team could be added to this folder. Oftentimes, admins will want to make a team folder more secure, so they'll say only team members can be added to this folder. So who can add people to these team folders? Right now, it's set to team members who can edit. But to make this more secure, I can say that only team admins can add access to this folder. I can prevent this folder from being accessed via link if I'd like to, and I can enable or disable viewer info within this folder as well.

Within this sales team folder, I can create another folder. So now I'm creating a hierarchy where I have DBX sales demo at the top level and DBX subfolder. So the subfolder can be managed independently. If I hit manage, you'll see that the members from the level above roll downwards, and here you can see them.

Now I can also add a group at this level, so I could if I wanted to add my marketing group to this level, or I could add an individual user to this level as well. If I were to add someone to this level, which is the sub-level, they would not get access to the level above this. So this is a good way to control permissions, and this is what we call waterfall permissions. So here I'll just add my marketing group, and I'll give them, in this case, view access to this folder. And there we can see that that folder was just shared with that second group. So here we can see the marketing group.

Now I can also break this inheritance chain if I'd like by removing this group that rolled downwards. So you'll recall we assigned the sales group at the top level, and that group rolled down. Now we can actually remove this group to break this inheritance chain, and we would call that subtractive permissioning. This does have some scale limits. So, make sure you talk to your TSS team member on an ideal that you might want to use subtractive permissioning, where you'd remove these permissions.