One of the key, powerful features of the Enterprise File Fabric is the ability for teams to simply and easy share and collaborate on files for the projects they are working on together, whatever the underlying local or cloud storage. This can easily be teams that are located in the same building, within the same continent or even across the planet from one another. The best part is that while the File Fabric can power this collaboration within an organization, it can also bridge the gap and securely allow teams across companies work on the same documents.
In this post, we’ll take a look at Shared Team Folders, allowing intra-organizational teams to work on the same file sets. Future posts will look at link and folder sharing, when you need to collaborate inter-organizationally.
After you add your storage providers to the File Fabric, an administrator is able to convert any folder/prefix from any added storage provider into a Shared Team Folder, via simply right clicking and selecting “Convert to a Shared Team Folder“. Once actioned you’ve got your first Shared Team Folder setup and you can start to assign permissions and user/group membership.
Firstly, note that the File Fabric can by default use its own authentication mechanism for users and groups, or it can be setup to integrate into enterprise directories (Active Directory, LDAP, SAML). Continuing on with our Shared Folder workflow, now that a given folder/prefix has been set to a Shared Team Folder, you can right click and set Permissions (see video below).
Regardless of where that storage resides, the File Fabric has a standard ‘NTFS’-like permission set. Either users or groups can be given Read permissions, Read/Write, or even the Manage Permissions to delegate permissions management to select users/groups. There are also permissions that satisfy a particular security use case such as ‘web view only’ in which the permissions can be set to only allow a user to view the files contained within a folder from the web, in which the files are not downloadable. This particular permission is often paired with the document watermark feature so that in addition to files only being viewable through the web browser the resultant document previews are watermarked with trackable information embedded.
Each time a user logs into the File Fabric, the system will look at all the Shared Team Folders on the system, and present each user only those folders the user has access to, and obviously only the permission that have been allowed.
Now all the users within your organization will be able to see the same files and sub-folders in that shared team folder. Standard reading/download and writing/upload are available, but advanced features like versioning, managed trash, comments, locking and comments all provide advanced collaboration services within those shared team folders.
This is just one way of collaborating with the File Fabric. In the past this blog has looked at virtual workspaces or data rooms, collaboration between sites for ROBO use cases, collaboration using Workflow controls, real-time document collaboration, and Slack based multi-cloud collaborations so feel free to check out our prior collaboration posts.
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by 
Eric Toczek
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