Group Administrators

Files.com supports delegated administration through the Group Admin role. A Group Admin is a group member who can manage the other members of their group. Delegating this work means a Site Administrator or a Workspace Administrator does not have to handle every onboarding, password reset, or offboarding.

Site Administrators and Workspace Administrators designate Group Admins. Only Site Administrators decide which user-management actions Group Admins can perform, and these settings apply site-wide to all Group Admins. When managing user accounts, each Group Admin acts only on users whose Primary Group matches their own group.

Group Admin Capabilities

A Group Admin can bring people into their groups by creating new users or adding existing users, and can remove members from the groups they manage. For users whose Primary Group is one of their groups, a Group Admin can also manage the account itself: editing user details, enabling or disabling the account, deleting the user, setting a user's password directly during creation or editing, resetting passwords, and preventing individual users from being disabled or deleted by User Lifecycle Rules.

Creating Users by Group Admin

Group Admins with create capability can add new users within their groups. During user creation, they configure standard user attributes, including folder permissions, FTP/SFTP Client Root Folder, FTP/SFTP Client Default Home Folder, and an access expiration date.

When a Group Admin creates a new user, the user's Primary Group automatically becomes the Group Admin's group at the moment of creation.

Adding or Removing Existing Users by Group Admin

The Add or remove existing users in their groups setting lets Group Admins work with accounts that already exist on the site. A Group Admin can add any existing user to a group they manage, and remove a member from a group they manage. Enabling the setting also expands what a Group Admin can see: they can search the site's full list of users to find the person to add. When the setting is disabled, a Group Admin can find only users whose Primary Group is a group they manage. The setting is off by default.

This capability is useful when the people who need group access already have user accounts on your Files.com site, created by your IT team or through automated provisioning. Without it, a Group Admin can only create new users, so bringing an existing user into the group means asking a Site Administrator. With the setting enabled, the Group Admin adds the existing account directly, and membership stays current as people move between teams or projects.

A Group Admin can add or remove members in any group they manage, even when the user's Primary Group is a different group.

A Group Admin cannot make anyone else a Group Admin. Only Site Administrators and Workspace Administrators can designate Group Admins.

Editing Users by Group Admin

Editing lets a Group Admin change a user's folder permissions, FTP/SFTP Client Root Folder, FTP/SFTP Client Default Home Folder, and profile attributes including Full Name, Email, Company, Notes, Tags, and Avatar.

Resetting Passwords by Group Admin

A Group Admin can reset a password only for users who have already set one. The reset option does not appear for users who sign in through SSO or who have not yet completed account signup, since they have no password to reset.

If a Site Administrator restricts manual user management when SSO is configured, Group Admins cannot manage those users in Files.com at all.

Resending Welcome Emails

When a Group Admin creates a user without setting a password directly, the user receives a welcome email to create their own account. The Resend welcome email option lets the Group Admin send this email again if the user misses the original, and appears only until the user has created their account.

Bypassing User Lifecycle Rules by Group Admin

User Lifecycle Rules can disable or delete accounts after a period of inactivity. The bypass capability lets a Group Admin mark individual users as exempt from this automatic disabling by setting the Prevent this user from being disabled due to inactivity flag on a user.

Grant this capability only when Group Admins need to override your User Lifecycle Rules for specific users, like service accounts or long-running integrations within the group.

Designating Group Admins

Site Administrators designate any group member as a Group Admin from the user's group membership, and Workspace Administrators do the same for groups inside their Workspace.

A group can have more than one Group Admin, and a user can be a Group Admin in more than one group, acting on each group's members separately. Removing the Group Admin role from a user does not affect the users they previously created.

Primary Group

Each user has at most one Primary Group, even if they belong to additional groups. A Group Admin can manage a user's account only if the user's Primary Group is one of the groups they manage. A Group Admin can add or remove existing users in the groups they manage no matter which Primary Group those users have.

The Primary Group for new users created by a Group Admin is automatically set to the Group Admin's group. Site Administrators and Workspace Administrators can view and change the Primary Group on any user, regardless of who created the user.

Users Without a Primary Group

Not every user has a Primary Group set. Users created by a Workspace Administrator or Site Administrator are not automatically assigned one, and existing users in the site may also lack a Primary Group.

A Group Admin cannot manage the account of a user without a Primary Group. To bring such users under Group Admin management, a Site Administrator or Workspace Administrator must assign each user the appropriate Primary Group. Group Admins allowed to add or remove existing users can still add these users to, and remove them from, groups they manage.