People, Systems & Partners
Files.com supports people working interactively and systems exchanging files without a person present. Both need an identity and an access arrangement. A Partner adds the organizational relationship around external participants, while a Share Link or Inbox can provide a focused interaction for a visitor without an ongoing account.
The participant's job determines the arrangement. A supplier's employee reviewing invoices and its billing application uploading them are different participants in the same business relationship.
Accounts And Credentials
A user account represents a person or system. Its permissions, allowed protocols, and authentication configuration govern access. An employee might sign in through your identity provider; an application might authenticate using an API key or SSH key. The credential establishes access for the connection, while the account supplies its identity and permissions.
Separate accounts for separate participants make access changes and activity easier to understand. The departure of a supplier employee should not require sharing another employee's login with the billing application. Authentication methods and API keys describe the supported arrangements.
An API key is not necessarily tied to a user. Files.com also supports site-wide keys, with their own scope and lifecycle. A user key stops working when its user is disabled or deleted; a site-wide key must be revoked or allowed to expire independently. Choose the credential's ownership deliberately rather than assuming that the person who created it is the identity behind every operation.
Internal Users And Groups
Groups collect regular user accounts that need shared access. Folder permissions assigned directly to a user and through their groups combine to determine access. A finance employee can belong to a finance group and another group for a particular project.
Group membership and administrative authority are different. Access to a team's files does not by itself make the user responsible for site settings or connections. Access & Ownership explains those layers.
Partners And Their Users
A Partner represents an outside organization, such as a supplier, client, or service provider. It contains the organization's human and automated accounts and gives your team one relationship to onboard, administer, and eventually remove.
Partner Users inherit the permissions assigned to their Partner and are confined to its root folder. They cannot be members of Groups or receive individual folder permissions. The supplier's employees and billing application can have separate credentials while receiving the same Partner-level folder permissions.
Where enabled, a Partner Admin can manage users and credentials for that Partner. This is delegated user management within the external relationship, not site-wide administration. Your administrators control the available Partner Admin capabilities and the Partner's access.
An external participant needing access across several Partners' folders requires a different arrangement. For example, a service that collects data from many supplier folders can use a regular user with appropriate folder permissions. The Partner boundary is intended for participants belonging to one external relationship.
Visitors And Focused Exchanges
A person receiving a Share Link or submitting through an Inbox does not necessarily need a Files.com user account. The link or intake point defines the interaction, and its configured access controls determine who may participate.
This fits a focused exchange such as sending a document package or collecting a submission. An ongoing account is more appropriate when someone needs recurring authenticated access through apps or protocols. Sharing & Collecting Files compares those choices.
In a supplier exchange, an Inbox can collect a one-time submission, a Partner can organize the supplier's continuing accounts, and an internal Group can grant finance staff access to the received files. These mechanisms can participate in one flow because they answer different questions: how someone interacts, which organization they belong to, and what they may access.