With Groups, Enterprise admins have the ability to add multiple users to folders and assign access permissions quickly and easily. When implemented effectively, groups streamline deployment and make long-term user management much simpler.
Note
Only users within your organization (managed users) can be added to Groups. You cannot add external users to your managed Groups.
To create a group:
- Go to Admin Console > Users & Groups.
- Click the Groups tab.
- Click Create.
- Enter a unique Name and an optional description. (While the Description field is optional, it is a good practice to enter a useful description, such as the purpose of the group and a summary of its membership and what content it shares.)
- Select the Permission Setting for the group, which defines who can invite this group to folders and view the members of the group, from:
- Company - anyone in your company
- Group Members - group members only
- Admins Only - Admins only (this choice does not allow members of he group to view the other members of the group or to invite the entire group to folders)
- Click Next.
- Optionally add managed users to the group.
- If you added users, optionally change the Permissions of the users you added. (If you did not define the users you added as group admins in the Add Members dialog box, you can do that now for any of the group members, or if a user was made a group admin and you do not want them in that role, you can make them just a group member.)
- Click Next.
- Optionally add shared folders to the group.
- Click Done.
To edit or delete an existing Group
- Navigate to the Groups tab (see above for instructions)
- Click on an existing group's name.
- On this page, you will see an overview of the group's details. You can edit the group by clicking any of the Edit buttons located on the page. You can also delete the group by clicking Delete Group in the upper right corner.
Best practices for Group management
Before creating your groups, it’s a good idea to consider both your company’s structure and the structure of your folders in Box.
Groups should fit your company
Because your organization is probably broken down into departments, project teams or other sub-units, you might need to grant different teams different levels of access – to different content. Groups make this division of labor easy to replicate in Box, and also give you the opportunity to create new teams along new lines.
Groups should fit your folder structure
Because you’ll be assigning folders to groups – and by extension, to multiple users – it helps to have a folder structure that makes sense. If you’ve set up your folders by department or project, then do the same with groups. This will make it easier to manage them, saving you time in the long run.
File access from multiple groups
It's not uncommon for two or more groups to have access to the same folder, with each group assigned a different permission level. In this case, anyone who belongs to both groups can access that folder at the higher permission level. For example:
- There's a "Projects" group whose members have editor access to the project invoices folder
- There's a "Project Admin" group whose members have co-owner access to the project invoices folder
- Juan is a member of both groups. As a result, Juan has co-owner access to the project invoices folder.