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Restricting External Collaboration in Your Organization

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Administrators can restrict users in your organization from sharing folders externally, or outside of your organization. This control gives IT and admins powerful, granular control over what content is shared externally or kept within the company, providing additional security.

When enabled for a user, the restriction is placed on all content owned by that user. However, it does not prohibit the user from inviting external collaborators to non-restricted folders owned by other users.

As an admin, you can:

  • Restrict external collaboration for an individual managed user
  • Restrict external collaboration for multiple managed users
  • Restrict external collaboration for all newly created managed users

To restrict external collaboration for an individual managed user:

  1. Edit a managed user, as in Configuring and Editing Users.
  2. In the Role and Access Permissions section, enable the Restrict External Collaboration setting.
  3. Click Save.

To restrict external collaboration for multiple managed users:

  1. Edit multiple managed users, as in Configuring and Editing Users.
  2. In the downloaded file, enter the value enabled in the row of each user for which you want external collaboration restricted.

You can also enter yes to enable external collaboration restrictions (disabled and no disable external collaboration restrictions), the value is case-insensitive, but the field must not be left blank.

To restrict external collaboration for all newly created managed users:

  1. Edit new user default settings, as in Editing New User Default Settings.
  2. In the New User Defaults Settings section, enable the Restrict external collaboration setting.
  3. Click Save.

What does the user see when an admin enables this setting?

  • When the restriction is enabled for a user, the folder properties for any folders they own have the Restrict collaboration to within <company domain> check box enabled, with no way for them to disable it.
    invitation_restrictions.png
  • If the user tries to add an external collaborator to a folder they own, an error message appears after they click Send with details about the external collaborator(s) that are restricted from being invited.
    invitation_restriction_error.png

External Collaboration Restriction Exceptions

  • Box Shield Smart Access policies allow administrators to define business justifications for exceptions to Smart Access policy collaboration restrictions. See About Smart Access for details.
  • When external collaboration restrictions are added to users, existing collaborations are not removed automatically. To remove existing external collaborators from restricted folders, go to Admin Console > Enterprise Settings > Users & Groups > External Users, and then edit the Folder Collaborations. See Managing External Users for details.
  • While when external collaboration restrictions are enabled on users they can't use Send Shared Link to send these links to external users, a user with the restriction enabled will still be able to share content externally with open shared links.

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