Child Site Management Policies

Child Sites provide the highest level of organizational separation for your Files.com infrastructure and are the right choice whenever you need hard boundaries between environments. A key feature of child sites is the ability to create Site Administrators that exist only in the child site. Within the child site, Site Administrators can access all files for the site, manage any type of object that exists within the site, and change any settings for the site.

Child site management policies are a centralized policy system that allows parent sites to enforce behavior across their child sites. The only type of policy that can be created is a Settings policy.

Settings policies for child sites allow a parent site's Site Administrators to restrict which settings the Site Administrators of a child site can affect. This provides the benefits of splitting your organization to support incompatible site-wide settings where needed while still retaining control over settings that must not differ across your organization's sites.

For example, imagine that your compliance program forbids the use of unencrypted FTP on any of your sites. Without a child site management policy, Site Administrators of a child site can enable unencrypted FTP for their child site at any time. If a parent site Site Administrator creates a settings policy to manage the Plain/unencrypted FTP Support setting and disables it, then child site Site Administrators are blocked from enabling it.

Child Site Settings Policies

Settings policies allow parent sites to enforce consistent configurations across their child sites. Because this is centralized, only Site Administrators of a parent site can create child site management policies. This maintains alignment with parent site standards and prevents overrides that could weaken governance.

When you define a settings policy, you must provide a Name for the policy.

You also have the option of providing a user-readable Description. The Description gives you the ability to add notes for reference.

You must also define the scope of affected child sites. Either a settings policy applies to all of your child sites, or you supply a list of child sites the policy does not affect.

You can add any of the supported site settings to your settings policy. Any settings you do not add to your policy can be modified within the child site.

When you save your settings policy, any applicable settings immediately take effect for child sites (except any child sites which have been excluded).

When a new child site is created, it automatically uses the settings from your settings policy.

Only 1 Settings Policy Allowed

A parent site can only create 1 child site settings policy. This eliminates the confusion of determining which of multiple policies would apply to any specific child site.

Assigning Settings to a Settings Policy

When you add a setting to a settings policy, you must also provide the value of that setting. The value of the setting must be valid for the setting in order to take effect.

Supported Settings for Settings Policies

Most of the site-wide settings for a site can be managed by a child site settings policy. The full list of supported settings is provided in our developer documentation.

Settings Policy Interactions with Parent Sites

Child site settings policies only apply to child sites; they never restrict or change the settings of a parent site.

Settings values are saved within the policy, and they do not automatically update if you change that setting within the parent site.