How Do I Change The Owner Of A Folder?
Answered
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- You must be owner of the folder.
- Invite to the folder the user you want to be owner at any collaborator level.
- Change that user's permission level to Owner. (See https://community.box.com/t5/Collaborate-By-Inviting-Others/Managing-Collaborators/ta-p/19812#transferfolderowner. You will get a warning that you are dropping your own permission to Editor.
- That's it.
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The quick answer is yes, you must be the owner of a folder to transfer ownership to someone else.
New admins often confuse what being an admin in Box means. It does not give you power over other users' accounts. Admin is an additional role. The account you log in as (hopefully) co-admin is an account like any other. What its role gives you is access to a set of management tools. In that toolbox is the ability to manage other accounts. You can add accounts, deactivate or even remove accounts. In answer to this question, it also gives you the ability to log into other users' accounts and act as that user. If your user leaves the company or, heaven forfend, dies, you can log in as that user and, while impersonating them, transfer ownership of individual folders the account owns to other accounts.
Thankfully any action like this that is taken by someone with an admin role is logged. Many larger Box enterprises will leverage the API to listen for these actions and send an email notification to a given address, typically a group account or archive, so that there is a clear, easily-accessible and auditable activity trail by admin users.
The scenario you are trying to address can be mitigated somewhat by setting up departmental accounts. If the department owns the work product and collaborative folders of the department, change of personnel and deactivation of accounts is less disruptive.
HTH,
Bob
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Thanks Bob. I wish customer support was as helpful as your are! I took your earlier advice and created a non-person account ***email address removed for privacy***. I was transferring ownership of the top level folders to this account. What a pain; I didn't see anyway to do that short of going to the folder and inviting the boxmanager user, then giving them co-ownership, the going into the manage collaborator screen then making them owner and removing my presence from the folder. Fortunately, since we are just getting going there weren't that many to do.
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Hi ,
That's kind of you to say.
One thing about what you described jumped out at me. You said you gave the boxmanager account "co-ownership". Does this mean you invited it as co-owner? If so, I'm afraid you'll need to go through the exercise again. Once the account is a collaborator, you need to then make it owner.
As a best practice, inside your boxmanager account, we recommend you set up one top-level folder and put all of those migrated folders into the top-level folder you just created. Now make your personal account (and/or that of another colleague) the co-owner of that top-level folder. This way you can manage these folders from one spot, but they are owned by boxmanager. You only need to log in as boxmanager when you transfer it ownership of a new folder and have to move it into your top-level folder. Make sense? Let me know if not. I can give specifics.
Best of luck,
Bob
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The person who originally set up our not for profit Box structure is currently the Owner of all the Folders. Consequently, that person has unlimited access to confidential data, notes and board minutes. How can we downgrade that person to simply an uploader. The Exec Director needs to be the Owner.
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Hi ,
Thanks for your post! You can change the owner of the folder by having the current owner transfer the folder to the right executive: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044196273-Managing-Collaborators#transferfolderowner
Follow those steps there and you'll be able to transfer the parent folder with all the content to the right collaborator.
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Hi ,
Welcome to the Box Community and thanks for your first post in the forum!
Here are some tips on how to determine folders you own and which are collaborative:
- Manila folders in your root level will always be folders you own.
- Blue folders-- you'll have to click into to see if you're the owner under the Sharing tab on the right-side menu--once you find a folder you own, you can add it to your favorites!
Check out our KB article on Folder Icons and Colors for more information on this.
Be sure to read our guidelines, Subscribe to content you like, and complete your profile on the community.
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This is really bad. As the Admin of the account no one user under should have a privilege that I don't have. Do I really need to log in as the owner just to transfer ownership? This does not make sense as an Admin for me to log in as someone else. I want to be able to change ownership without having to log in as the owner of a folder. They own the folder they are not the admin.
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So what I've been able to gleen from this post, and my limited experience attempting to admin my company's account is that Box.com is not actually for enterprises. It's for individuals. The tools available to admin the account are rudimentary (and that's being generous) and the system requires you to do everything in super manual, many-click operations for even the most mundane tasks that other enterprise-focused file storage applications can do in much simpler ways. The fact that its nearly impossible to do ANY bulk operations is ridiculous. How do you keep any corporate customers with more than 5 users? It's a wonder...
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