Note
This article is intended for Box administrators at larger enterprises with multiple EIDs. It describes an option available only to organizations that have worked with Box Customer Success to assign an email domain to their EID.
An EID is an Enterprise IDentification. When your company became a Box customer, Box assigned it a unique Box EID. We use your EID for a range of purposes, including billing and troubleshooting. You also can opt to use EIDs as a criterion for collaborating on content via shared links, rather than your email domain.
Most Box customers have just a single Box EID that is tied to a single email domain. However, a large enterprise composed of multiple discrete subsidiaries or affiliates may have multiple EIDs. That's because if each subsidiary has a unique set of regulatory, compliance, or financial requirements, they may be kept operationally separate, and so have unique Box EIDs.
In the case of shared links, Box provides admins of these large enterprises with the option of defining whether a link shared with “people in your company” is based on the company email domain or the company’s Box EID.
- Enabling shared links based on email domain means that when someone shares content with "People in your company," the link can actually be accessed by everyone across all an enterprise’s EIDs because they share the same email domain.
- Enabling shared links based on Box EID means that when someone shares content with “people in your company,” the link can be accessed only by people in that specific subsidiary with that specific Box EID.
Here’s an example:
Acme Holding Corporation consists of three separate businesses -- Acme Electronics, Acme Travel, and Acme Entertainment. Each business is kept separate. As a result, Acme may have three separate Box EIDs -- one for each business -- but only one email domain (person@acme.com). So a Box link that can be set to “people in your company” can be shared across all three businesses because it’s based on the email domain -- not the EID. To prevent people at Acme Entertainment from accessing or sharing links with people at either of the other two Acme companies, an Acme Box Admin can configure the organization so that “people in your company” is based on EID, instead.
Note
The default setting is by email domain.
Tip
If you configure a less-restrictive sharing setting for your organization globally, your people gain more of the benefit of content collaboration on Box, without necessarily sacrificing security. Largely, this is because at an individual level anyone can still restrict access to the content they share. So even though, for example, your company definition may allow for cross-business sharing, individually people can still limit collaboration to specific folders or individuals.
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