Cambridge University Press & Assessment Replaced Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile With Files.com for Governed Sharing

Cambridge University Press & Assessment is the publishing and assessment arm of the University of Cambridge. It publishes academic and educational content and runs global examination and certification programmes, including Cambridge English, IELTS, and the IGCSE, AS and A Level curricula, through a worldwide network of authorised test centres.

Almost nothing this business handles is casual. Question papers, answer sheets, audio files, and other assessment material are confidential by nature, and they move constantly between internal teams and out to test centres, printers, and partners around the world. File exchange at Cambridge is not one department’s job. It happens across the organization, by whichever team needs to send something. Which meant, for years, that it happened through whichever tool that team had at hand.

To establish a common policy, Cambridge replaced Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile with Files.com for selected file-transfer workflows.

A Patchwork of Sharing Tools, and Links Nobody Could Count

Different parts of the business ran different sharing tools. Some teams used Dropbox. Others used Egnyte or ShareFile. Each had been adopted for its own workflow, and no single policy governed all of them. A share link, once created, lived as long as its creator let it, which was usually forever. Nothing required a password. Nothing applied an expiry. Administrators did not have a single view of links across the business or a central way to revoke them.

For an organization whose everyday files include material this sensitive, indefinite, unpassworded links spread across separate products prevented a consistent policy and central inventory.

The problem persisted because no team-level fix could touch it. The merger had joined two large institutions, each with its own systems and habits, and rationalizing the combined estate was a multi-year job. The sharing habit itself was distributed across roughly 6,400 people. At that scale, asking every team to police its own links fails by arithmetic: links get created faster than any manual cleanup can retire them, and the people creating them are doing their jobs, not managing an inventory.

The fix had to put the policy in the platform rather than the person. Expiry applied as standard. Passwords required by the site, not remembered by the sender. Every link visible to an administrator who can act on all of them at once. And it had to be easy enough that people actually used it, because a governed tool nobody uses just becomes a fourth tool in the patchwork.

Sharing Under Policy Instead of Habit

Cambridge configured the controls that used to depend on individual discipline as settings of its Files.com site. A site-wide setting requires every share link to be password protected, while a 90-day expiry applies as standard. Because the links live on one platform, administrators can see the whole estate and govern it centrally, which no combination of three separate products allowed.

The platform also made governed sharing something teams could run themselves. Using Files.com groups and group admins, each team manages its own users and folders within its own area, so governance scales across the business without bottlenecking on central IT. For external deliveries, recipient registration and access logs tie downloads to named recipients.

14,000 Links, Visible and Governed

At its peak, the Files.com site carried 14,000 live share links, an honest measure of how much ad hoc exchange a business this size actually does. What changed is what that number meant. Spread across separate products and thousands of individual accounts, those links had been fragmented. On Files.com, administrators can see every link and govern them centrally.

The live-link count came down from that peak as 90-day expiry became standard. Every link is password protected because the site requires it, not because a sender remembered to add one. Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile are no longer used for the workflows moved to Files.com, while additional teams continue adopting the platform and inherit the same policy from day one.

Governance That Expands With Adoption

Today, teams using Files.com have the expiry, password protection, and access record in place before the first file moves. What used to depend on each sender’s discipline is now a property of the platform.