You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Hiding unshared Team folders from non-member Team members
I'm setting up a new Team Folder. Previously, users only saw the folders that they had access to. Now, all folders are listed. Those that they don't have permission to see are showing up with a Folder/Building/- symbol indicating that they don't have permission to see what's in those folders.
I don't want unshared folders to be visible to everyone. Some of these folders are top-level company members only. I know this has been addressed in the past and at that time the only workaround was to set up all of the folders in your Personal Team Member folder. I am really hoping that there has been a change in the parameters since this post was made and resolved.
This option seems like it would be an essential option everyone needs. Does one really need everyone on the team to know that there's a folder for Company Payroll or Payroll Review? or even as basic as Accounting? In my experience, people only want to see in the folders that they know the name of but yet don't have access to.
I'm doing a Dropbox cutover this weekend and just discovered this issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!! The worst case is that I set them all up under my personal folder now and move them out if I find out that there's a better resolution out there.
Thanks, community!!!
Hi WVU90SAM, thanks for posting here today!
I'm afraid that the same behavior remains now. The Team folder would be visible, it would just show as a locked folder. What you could do, is what you already mentioned: move the content under your personal folder.
Your feedback regarding this has been very valuable and I will endeavor to make sure your voice is heard.
If you need anything else, let me know!
Hi,
I have the exact same issue.
I just did some well needed file organization and sorting this weekend, and consolidated company administration files in dropbox. I was careful to set the sharing options so only the right people got access to what they needed. Now this morning I get questions from all the team members about the folders that they can see but don't access. I have looked everywhere to try to hide them, but id does not seem possible.
Please address this problem.
Best regards,
Simon
Exactly! I had to set up all of the folders under my folder and share them accordingly so that no one can see the unshared folders. I can't believe that this is still an issue -- especially when it wasn't before.
Dropbox, please fix this. Megan
nada_dbxDropbox Product Manager
Hi, Dropbox product team member here. We're working on an update of the Team Space experience and I hear your feedback. We want to make it so that Team Folders are invisible to the team members they are not shared with. Part of that work is understanding how much to expose when members have access somewhere down the tree. For example, if there is a Team Folder structure like Accounting/Payroll/2023/Market Research, and you give a team member access directly to the Market Research folder. How would you say their Dropbox view should look:
1. With the full path of the folder exposed: Accounting/Payroll/2023/Market Research so that they understand where the folder exists and how to navigate to it
2. With only /Market Research visible so they have no exposure to which folder it lives in.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
It's great to hear that you all are exploring a solution.
While I try to not share any subfolders as a general practice (because I don't want to memorize who has access to each of the subfolders), if I were to share a subfolder, I would only want the person to see the part of the path that they have access to. So, option 2. With only /Market Research visible so they have no exposure to which folder it lives in.
Thanks!
Hi,
I see that this is not so simple. For a small organization I think option 2 would be quite simple and straight forward. But as soon as you start sharing more subfolders under the same parent folder it will be very hard for the user to keep things organized if the folders show up without parents. A related scenario that I need most is to unshare/hide subfolders. Example: The hole team have access to Accounting/ and all the subfolders in there, but the folder Accounting/payroll/ is hidden/unshared for everyone except of a few. This could only be achieved with Option 1 so I vote for that!
- Hi, i have the same issue with my team folders, all members see entirely space. It is so distracting. Solution to organize folder structure for shared subfolder only with a full path (Option2). These way it would be much easier to maintain apps that are connected to folders or files with specific full path of the content in different local computers. Thank you Dropbox starting to work on that issue)
I'm also interested in the functionality of hiding folders that a user doesn't have access to. Many top-level folders aren't appropriate for our entire team. From a purely organizational perspective, nesting top-level files within another (personal) file is counter-intuitive and counter-productive. We recently switched to Dropbox for our rapidly growing team, and this issue is a significant one that I hope gets resolved quickly.
I'm happy to see that the Dropbox team is actively looking into addressing the issue. For the above, I prefer option 1 to show a user the subfolder origin.
Hi wondering if there has been any further progress on this.
Our structure has enabled us to create multiple teams, and different teams having access to the folders necessary, however we really need people not to see the folders they dont have access for. I need to reduce clutter for certain teams as well as keep information confidential
- Megan
Dropbox Staff
Hi WVU90SAM, thanks for posting here today!
I'm afraid that the same behavior remains now. The Team folder would be visible, it would just show as a locked folder. What you could do, is what you already mentioned: move the content under your personal folder.
Your feedback regarding this has been very valuable and I will endeavor to make sure your voice is heard.
If you need anything else, let me know!
This is very basic folder security that I have been able to do in the Microsoft world for a few decades. For businesses with alot of content its an essential feature.
