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Hi all - we are currently doing some piloting of using Shared department accounts and folders in Box. Essentially, we create a unique user “DeptABC” and a top level folder, and then give the department managers co-owner permissions to the top level folder. The idea is that everyone in DeptABC can now put all of their content in the ‘shared’ folder and we don’t have to worry about one member of the department leaving the University and making sure it gets transferred, etc, etc. The co-owners can just add/remove other co-owners as needed. 

Two questions: 

  1. Is anyone else doing this? Have any pros/cons to share?
  2. We are thinking about having just one unique user and then having multiple department folders, “deptA”, “deptB”, “deptC” . Each folder would have a co-owner that is the manager of the department and the users do their work in that folder. People in Dept A would be able to see Dept B’s content etc. Can anyone think of any downside of this? 

Thanks!

Karen

This is exactly what we do. The con is that we have employees that ignore this structure, and continue to store university data in their personal Box folder.

 

We also use Okta as our identity provider and pass groups to Box to automatically assign root departmental folders to new employees.

I am not sure I understand the second part; we have one service account that owns all departmental root folders.  Users in Dept A cannot see data in Dept B.

I’m looking for pros/cons of each shared departmental folder owned by it’s own unique system ID, vs. one unique system ID that owns all the department folders. For example, 

Owner A owns Dept Folder A

Owner B owns Dept Folder B

vs.

Owner 123 owns DeptFolder A and DeptFolder B, and all the other department shared folders.

We created a “root” folder for each portfolio (top level departments - about a dozen).  When we create a department folder, we put it in the appropriate portfolio folder and create a group for that folder and assign it co-owner privs.  We manage the groups from our group management system.  

When we first set this up, we were concerned with creating 300 department “users” would eat into our license seat count, whereas the dozen we used are mostly lost in the noise.  Of course alll this was decided when we had just started with Box and had no experience with it.  We continue to use this model for faculty and research groups who want shared box space - we create a folder in the appropriate portfolio folder and a co-owner group.  We currently require two co-owners when we create a new shared box.

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