A Partner represents an external organization that collaborates with your site, such as a client, vendor, agency, or supplier. Each Partner provides an isolated, secure workspace that contains the users and automated accounts belonging to that organization. All activity for those users is confined to the Partner’s assigned root folder, ensuring that each organization can only view and manage its own data.

You can think of a Partner as a guest suite within your site. Each Partner has its own set of keys, its own front door, and its own space. The Partner’s users can work freely within that space, but cannot see or access anything outside of it. This ensures that every external organization has a dedicated, self-contained environment that supports secure and efficient collaboration.

Partner Management Simplifies Administration

You can extend access to external entities while maintaining strict separation between them and your internal users. Site Administrators can delegate limited user management to designated Partner Admins, giving those organizations the ability to manage their own users, credentials, and encryption keys without exposing the broader site. This delegation relieves Site Admins from the need to handle individual account provisioning, password resets, or permission updates for external users.

Site Administrators can also delegate further within their Partners, empowering multiple Partner Admins to share responsibility for managing access and credentials. This ensures that collaboration scales efficiently without adding workload for your internal teams.

Partners enable delegated administration within strict boundaries, securely supporting both human users and automated system accounts belonging to the same external entity. You can provide your counterparties with self-service user administration without the risks of shared logins or inconsistent 2FA enforcement.

Because there's only 1 set of permissions to manage for each partner, you can onboard new trading partners in minutes instead of days and add new users without the need for extensive configuration. This fast, efficient setup makes it easy for your trading partners to do business with you.

Example Use Case: Agency Collaboration

Provide a secure workspace for contractors or service firms who need to upload or retrieve files without accessing internal data. This is particularly helpful if your contractors need to use protocol access or the Desktop App to transfer extremely large files that would be unwieldy for a web-based solution, such as full access Share Links.

Example Use Case: Manufacturing & Supply Chain

Create a Partner for each supplier so they can securely upload product specifications, invoices, and shipment confirmations into their designated root folder.

By unifying the permissions in the Partner, you can allow third-party logistics (3PL) companies to use API or SFTP keys to exchange order and tracking data automatically, while human users can access the files using credentials that include 2FA security.

Use tags and user lifecycle rules to automatically deactivate inactive supplier accounts after a defined period, ensuring compliance and security.