Child sites are a separate, fully functional site under your main Files.com site, known as the parent site. Each child site runs with its own settings, users, and rules, making it easier to manage different needs across your organization. Instead of forcing everyone to follow the same setup, you can give each team or department their own space to work, without interfering with the parent site.

Child sites handle situations where different groups need different workflows or different site-wide settings. Your IT team might require strict security settings, while your marketing team prefers more flexibility, but your finance team requires specific data governance and retention settings. Perhaps your legal team is working on a sensitive M&A project that shouldn’t mix with other files. If you have multiple brands that need different storage requirements, you need to meet varying sets of regulations for compliance. Maybe you need a staging environment to safely test new processes and code. With child sites, you can give each group a separate environment that exactly fits their needs.

Files.com provides Child Sites to customers on a qualifying plan. A child site is an entirely separate site with its own subdomain. The content and settings of each child site is self-contained, but is associated with the primary account.

You can manage all child sites from your parent site - switch between sites quickly, view and interact with files, automate transfers between sites, and track usage. Child sites also let you delegate tasks—teams can manage their own users and automations, while you stay in control of the overall setup.

Site administrators of a parent site have full access to the contents of child sites. Parent site administrators can create Automations or Remote Server Syncs that are managed within the parent site and interact with child sites.

Each child site will have access to the same level of features provided its parent site's plan, such as how often Remote Server Syncs can be triggered. Child sites share the user and usage quota of the parent site, meaning that 10 users used by the child site will consume 10 of the paid user seats purchased by the parent site.

Reselling of child sites is not permitted unless you have a separate reseller agreement with Files.com.

Example Use Case: Departmental Organization

If your company has multiple departments, you could isolate each department into its own child site. This keeps their files, settings, branding, logging, and projects separate from the parent site or other child sites within your company. You can organize the child sites in the same way if your company has multiple subsidiaries.

Example Use Case: Special Projects

Child sites are useful for confidential projects, such as M&A efforts. You can establish a dedicated child site for a project, allowing project teams to customize their setups, including integrations, automations, security settings, and sharing project-specific files.

Example Use Case: Regional Requirements

For companies operating across various geographical locations, child sites can also be used to manage storage or language separately for each region. This facilitates convenient and organized management.

Example Use Case: Development / Staging Environments

A child site offers an ideal way to create staging (sandbox) sites. By utilizing child sites as staging sites, you have a controlled environment to experiment with various changes and updates before implementing them on the production, parent site.

Example Use Case: Incompatible Requirements

If one group of users or flows within your site has requirements that are not compatible with another, a child site provides an isolated container for those exceptions. For example, if a handful of outside partners with legacy systems cannot use the most secure, modern ciphers, those users could connect to a child site set aside for them that allows insecure ciphers, while all of your other users connect to your parent site that requires secure ciphers only.

Similarly, you might need a different maximum number of days for Share Links to be available to separate groups of users. By splitting one group into its own child site, you can change that child site's global Share Link Expiration setting.

Example Use Case: Warm Storage, Archive or Data Retention

Child sites can also be used as a robust solution for businesses and organizations who want to extend their Files.com site as a secure storage archive to meet data retention compliance or regulatory requirements. Parent site Automations can transfer files between the parent and child sites, or between multiple child sites.

By enabling Archive-only mode, files and folders are safeguarded against any unintended modifications or deletions, offering a level of stability and security crucial for compliance-driven environments.