"Department" Box folders

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.

We just have one folder “_DEPT” that is at the top level and owned by our single service account.  Inside that folder is all of our “departmental” folders and we work with departments to get them setup and ensure they understand Box’s waterfall permissions so that they can correctly design the folder layout.
An example would be IT.  Our Database team has their own folder as does our Server Management team, both don’t see each other’s folders, but our AVPs see all folders within the IT departmental folder.
The reason we don’t have a seperate service account for each department is that we have over 300 departments and we don’t want to eat up licenses with accounts that aren’t really going to be doing anything besides holding data.
Currently we are playing “catch-up” because our Box environment is pretty all over the place and our end goal is that no end user actually owns any data.  Each user will be auto shared on their specific departmental folders via our IDM system with birthright access and then also be a co-owner on their personal folder which is owned by our service account.  This will make it very simple to automatically share out a user’s personal folder to their manager when they leave or when there is a request from the manager.
Let me know if you have any other questions!

I’m assuming if you use the single user account for all your shared department folders, you don’t worry about storage allocations? We are trying to limit our users, but there isn’t really a good way of monitoring storage by folder vs. storage by user.