Ownership and Permissions

An Automation belongs to your site or to a Workspace, never to a person, and it runs with its owner's permissions. An Automation owned by the site can process any folder on the site, and an Automation owned by a Workspace can process only folders in that Workspace.

A workflow owned by a person stops or loses access to the folders it needs when that person's role changes or their account is disabled or deleted. An Automation owned by the site or a Workspace is not affected by a change to any person's role or account.

Site and Workspace Ownership

An Automation created on the site is owned by the site. An Automation created in a Workspace is owned by that Workspace. Every Sync, AS2 Station, AS2 Partner, GPG key, On-Premise Agent, and Automation that a node references must belong to the same site or Workspace as the Automation, and Files.com checks this when you save, because the Automation can use only its owner's resources.

Editing an Automation does not change its owner, and disabling or deleting the user who created or last edited it changes nothing about how it runs.

Who Can Create and Edit an Automation

Site Administrators can create and edit every Automation on the site. Workspace Administrators can create and edit the Automations in their Workspace. Folder Admins can create and edit Automations for the folders they administer.

Who Can Start a Run

Folder Admins, Workspace Administrators, and Site Administrators can start a run of an Automation they can access, from the Automation or through the Files.com API. An Automation with a File Action trigger cannot be started manually, because its runs start from recorded file activity.

Who Sees Runs

Site Administrators can view the runs of every Automation on the site. Other users can view the runs of the Automations they can access.

Child Sites

An Automation belongs to one site and is managed through that site. An Automation in a Parent Site can use folders in its Child Sites as sources and destinations, through the Child Site folders in the underscore folder, and the Automation and its Run Logs exist only in the Parent Site. An Automation in a Child Site processes only that Child Site's folders. A File Action trigger starts only from file activity recorded in the Automation's own site.

Security Considerations

The folders a run can read and write are the owner's, not those of the person who started the run. To limit the folders an Automation can access, build it in a Workspace.

A command run by an Agent Compute node must be approved in the Agent's configuration on your own server, and the Agent does not run a command that is not approved, so an Automation cannot run an arbitrary command on your server. A request to the URL of a Webhook trigger starts a run for any caller that has the URL, so treat the URL as a credential. An Incoming Email trigger rejects mail from any sender not listed in its Allowed Senders.