I am not a fan of Dropbox. Stories like this are why I don’t use it.
A couple of years ago I inherited managing Dropbox for a company I was at. I’d never really used Dropbox in a more daily use company.
I discovered Dropbox wasn’t very IT admin friendly. If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to share it out. So when new employees ask why IT can’t access and share the folder, we had to explain that’s how Dropbox works.
The other crappy thing I discovered about Dropbox from that time. I have no way to audit or tell who has what folder. If someone was sharing something illegal from their folder, I had to turn on the auditing capability and download logs as they were generated. It was confusing because if someone were sharing something and I was the admin of that account, I should have access to all files and accounts. Nope. So we dumped Dropbox before I left to avoid scrutiny down the road for any acquisitions of the company.
Dropbox is still a consumer product trying to be a workplace tool IMO. Maybe others have a different opinion.
> If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to share it out.
> It was confusing because if someone were sharing something and I was the admin of that account, I should have access to all files and accounts. Nope.
In both cases, you should be able to assume the shared folder owner (via the admin console) and modify their permissions. Did this not work for you?
(note: I'm an ex-Dropbox eng that worked on a lot of the sharing/team management systems)
> The other crappy thing I discovered about Dropbox from that time. I have no way to audit or tell who has what folder.
Have felt similar pain with G Suite Drive. Perhaps I simply didn’t find or didn’t have the proper permissions (I wasn’t the top level admin on the org) but at some point I wrote a Python script to output a list of users who had access to each file in our organization. I saw no way of generating this automatically.
A couple of years ago I inherited managing Dropbox for a company I was at. I’d never really used Dropbox in a more daily use company.
I discovered Dropbox wasn’t very IT admin friendly. If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to share it out. So when new employees ask why IT can’t access and share the folder, we had to explain that’s how Dropbox works.
The other crappy thing I discovered about Dropbox from that time. I have no way to audit or tell who has what folder. If someone was sharing something illegal from their folder, I had to turn on the auditing capability and download logs as they were generated. It was confusing because if someone were sharing something and I was the admin of that account, I should have access to all files and accounts. Nope. So we dumped Dropbox before I left to avoid scrutiny down the road for any acquisitions of the company.
Dropbox is still a consumer product trying to be a workplace tool IMO. Maybe others have a different opinion.
This is a good story to tell on Monday.