Creating and Managing Groups

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.

Please note that only users within your organization (managed users) can be added to Groups. You cannot add external users to your managed Groups.

Creating a Group

To create a group:

1. Log in to your account and navigate to the Admin Console

2. In the left pane, click Users & Groups.

3. To create a group, navigate to the Groups tab and click Create in the upper right corner.
4. Enter the name of the Group. A description is optional. Then specify who can invite this group to folders and view the members of the group. You can choose to limit these permissions to your entire company, the members of this group, or admins only.

5. Click Add Members to add users to your new group. Enter a user's name or email address. You can add multiple users at once. Keep in mind that you can only add managed users. Once you have a list of all users you'd like to add, click Add

6. You can assign group admins by clicking into the Permissions Dropdown. Once you are ready to continue, click Next.

7. Choose which files and folders you would like this group to have access to. Click Share Folders, then click Select on all folders into which you'd like to invite the group. You can select multiple folders at the same folder level, but if you click into a new folder, any prevous selections will be removed. When you have chosen all necessary folders, click Done.

8. Choose the access level that members of this group will have in the folders you have invited them into by clicking into the Permissions Dropdown. You can give the group different permissions in different folders. Once you are ready to continue, click Done.

9. You have created a group! From this page, you can 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.

To edit or delete an existing Group

1. Navigate to the Groups tab (see above for instructions)
2. Click on an existing group's name.
3. 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.