Administrative Permission Levels

Administrative permission levels define what management actions a user account can perform within a Files.com site. They let Site Administrators delegate responsibilities, limit access to sensitive controls, and separate duties across teams without granting full administrative access to every user.

Each administrative role grants a clearly scoped set of capabilities. Some roles provide full control over the site. Others allow limited administration of users, folders, billing, or visibility into system configuration and logs.

Site Administrator

Site Administrators have the most powerful level of access to your site. A Site Administrator can manage everything within your Files.com site, with no restrictions on the types of records they can change. For this reason, limit Site Administrator status to users who require that level of access.

When a new site is created, the first user is a Site Administrator. That first user account may be modified by any other Site Administrator.

Site Administrators and Child Sites

Site Administrators for a parent site can connect to all its child sites. When they connect, they have the same level of access to the child site as a Site Administrator created directly there.

Users of a parent site can be made Site Administrators for a child site. This grants the same access as creating their account within the child site and configuring them as a Site Administrator there, but requires less configuration. You provision the user once in the parent site and manage their access to relevant child site content, instead of re-creating separate user accounts in each child site for the same person.

Parent site users can be members of a group that is granted Site Administrator access to a child site, making it even easier to delegate administration for your child sites.

Users with Site Administrator access for a child site have full control over every file and folder within the child site. They can configure any of the settings for the child site that are not blocked by a child sites settings policy.

Workspace Administrator

Workspace Administrators have full administrative control within their assigned Workspace. They can manage all resources within their Workspace, including users, groups, partners, folders, automations, remote servers, syncs, notifications, security keys, and data governance settings. Workspace Administrators cannot access or modify anything outside their Workspace, including other Workspaces, main site resources, or site-wide settings. A user can be a Workspace Administrator for one or more Workspaces.

Site Administrators can designate a Workspace Administrator by switching to a Workspace and creating a new user with the Workspace Administrator role, or by promoting an existing user from the main site (default Workspace) to Workspace Administrator for a specific Workspace. Workspace Administrators can also designate additional Workspace Administrators within their own Workspace by creating a new user with the role or by promoting an existing Workspace user.

Partner Administrator

Partner Admins are Partner Users who are designated to manage users within their own Partner. Their authority is limited to the Partner boundary and does not extend to site-level settings, internal users, Groups, or resources outside the Partner.

Site Administrators explicitly control Partner Admin capabilities through Partner Admin settings. These settings define which user management actions Partner Admins can perform for their Partner. Partner Admins have the same folder access as other Partner Users, cannot be added to Groups, and cannot hold administrative permissions outside the Partner.

Group Admin

Each group can have one or more members designated as Group Admins. A Group Admin manages users whose Primary Group is their own group.

Site Administrators decide site-wide which user-management capabilities Group Admins can use. The available actions are creating users, editing user details, enabling or disabling accounts, deleting users, setting and resetting passwords, and exempting individual users from User Lifecycle Rules. These capabilities apply only to users in the Group Admin's group.

Site Administrators retain full control over all users and groups across the site. Workspace Administrators can manage users and groups within their workspace scope.

If a Site Administrator or Workspace Administrator is also assigned as a Group Admin, this does not provide any additional permissions beyond their existing full access.

Folder Admin

Folder admin is a user or group permission granted for a folder. Folder admins have full control over all the Folder Settings and Automations for a folder, and unlimited access to the contents of their folder.

Folder admins can manage permissions for their folder by assigning or removing permissions for other users and groups, or by managing permission fences for the folder. They cannot add or remove their own folder permissions. Because they can only manage folder permissions, they cannot create, change, or remove groups or other users.

Within the web interface, folder admins can list other user accounts so they can create notifications and permissions for those users.

Unlike other permissions, the folder admin permission is always recursive, granting administrator level access for all sub-folders.

Site Administrators do not have permissions assigned for any folders, so a Site Administrator cannot also be a folder admin. They have unlimited access to every folder in their site regardless.

Billing Administrator

Users can be designated as a Billing administrator in the user's settings. A billing administrator can see billing information, invoice history, and usage data. Billing administrators can open tickets with our support team, but they cannot grant site access to the support team.

Making a user account a billing administrator does not grant access to any files or folders.

Site Administrators are automatically billing administrators because they already have access to everything for a site, including billing information.

Read-only Administrator

Users can be configured as a Read-only administrator in the user's settings. A read-only administrator can view but not change site settings.

The read-only administrator setting is separate from the user's file or folder permissions. A read-only administrator user must have Share permission to create their own share links, but they can view all existing share links because they are a read-only administrator. Similarly, a read-only administrator can see all existing automations, but must also be a Folder admin to create a new automation or change an existing one.

Site Administrators can configure a read-only administrator to receive alert emails about problems with their site. These include alerts about LDAP, SMTP, Webhook, or single sign-on integration failures, SSL certificates about to expire, Sync and GPG encryption or decryption errors, users locked out after too many failures, and CLI operation failures when sending logs to the cloud.

Site Administrators cannot be granted the read-only administrator privilege, because Site Administrators have full access to everything within your site.

Read-only Administrators and Child Sites

Users of a parent site can be made read-only administrators for a child site. This grants the same access as creating their account within the child site and configuring them as a read-only administrator there. This approach requires less configuration than creating separate user accounts for each child site, and it lets your users log in at a central parent site to access any of their child sites.

Parent site users can be members of a group that is granted read-only administrator access to a child site, making it even easier to delegate that access for your child sites.

As on a parent site, making a user a read-only administrator for a child site does not grant access to any files or folders of the child site. Read-only administrators on a child site can view relevant site settings, but cannot change those settings.

Demonstration Use Case

In this scenario, we have a mortgage broker that needs to assign the appropriate administration privileges for their Files.com site.

The mortgage broker operates from two branches (central and east). Carter is the head of IT and works out of the central office. Ellen is a help desk technician stationed in the east office. Each office has a sales team, a processing team, and a client services team, and each of those teams has a designated team leader. Chale handles all vendor payments and works from the central office.

Carter, as the head of IT, is a Site Administrator for the Files.com site. Carter can update any setting or file within the site, create users and groups directly, or set up automatic provisioning.

As the business grows, the mortgage broker opens a new division for commercial lending. Carter creates a Workspace for the commercial lending division and designates Morgan as the Workspace Administrator. Morgan can now onboard and offboard users, manage groups and partners, configure automations, set up remote servers, and apply folder permissions within the commercial lending Workspace on a self-service basis. Morgan cannot see or access anything in the central or east branch operations, and Carter retains full visibility across all Workspaces.

Carter defines user groups representing each team at each office and assigns users into their teams. Carter can assign folder permissions to a group to give each member a base level of access to specific folders, and can assign team leads admin-level access for specific folders.

Carter designates the team lead users as group admins for their respective groups. As group admins, they can add new users directly to their groups. With folder permissions assigned at the group level, this may be all the setup needed to create user accounts for new team members.

Ellen helps the staff of the east office when they run into a technical problem, so she needs to access log files and review how automations are configured. Carter makes Ellen a read-only administrator.

Because Chale is responsible for vendor payments, Carter creates a user account for Chale that is not assigned to any department team and has no access to files or folders. Chale's account is set as a billing administrator, letting him access the invoices for the Files.com site.