Every share names exactly one of four audiences.
The four
| Share with | Means | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| A person | This one named user. | A genuine exception. One person, one folder. |
| A group | Everybody in that group, now and later. | A team — accounts, design, the Mumbai office. |
| A role | Everybody holding that role. | A job — every manager, every accountant. |
| Everyone | Everybody who works here. Not customer or vendor logins. | The handbook, the letterhead, the price list. |
The share dialog also lists Clients and Vendors: the customer and vendor portal logins, one by one. Pick one of those to put a file in front of a customer or a supplier.
Prefer a group or a role
This is the single most useful habit on this screen, and it costs nothing to adopt.
Share Finance with the accounts group and somebody joining accounts next March can see it on their first morning. Nobody does anything. Somebody leaving loses it the moment they are taken out of the group.
Share the same folder with Priya, Rahul and Meera by name and you have written down a fact that was true in March. In September Priya has moved to sales and still sees the payroll folder, and the new accountant cannot — and the only way anybody finds out is when somebody complains.
Every named-person share is a small future problem. Use them where there genuinely is no group, and go back and tidy them up when there is.
Everyone means everyone who works here
Including people who join later, and including whoever is standing at somebody’s desk. It is right for a letterhead and wrong for anything you would hesitate to print and leave on a table.
It does not reach a customer or vendor login. Those see only what is shared with them by name under Clients or Vendors, or with their portal role, and an outside login is never the administrator of your documents, whatever its role says.
What a customer or vendor sees
A file you share with a client or vendor login appears on the Files tab of their portal, and so does everything in a folder you share with them, subfolders included. Each file shows its size, the date it last changed and the folder it sits in, named from the folder you shared downwards: share Clients / Acme with Acme and they read Acme / Drawings, never Clients.
Tapping a file opens it to read. Download sits beside it when the share allows downloads; when it does not, the row says View only. A web page or a drawing with a script in it opens as plain text, so nothing in a file runs on the portal.
They do not see your tags, your storage, your other folders, or who else a file is shared with. Every time they open or download a file it is written on the file’s activity, as Viewed or Downloaded on the customer or vendor portal.
Changing your mind
Remove a share and access stops immediately — the rule is read on every request rather than cached into a session, so somebody does not keep access until they sign out and in again.
A public link is not a share and is not removed by removing a share. If a file has been put on a link, you have to revoke the link separately.
A worked structure
A twenty-person business, set up once and left alone:
| Folder | Shared with | Level | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company | Everyone | View | Yes |
| Company / Templates | Everyone | View | Yes |
| Finance | Accounts group | Edit | Yes |
| Finance / Statutory | Accounts group | View | No |
| Contracts | Management role | View | No |
| Design | Design group | Edit | Yes |
| HR | Two people, by name | Edit | No |
Six of those seven rules will still be right in three years, because they name a job rather than a person. The seventh is HR, which is the genuine exception — and it is worth making a group for even so, the moment there are three people in it.
Reviewing shares
- When somebody leaves, taking them out of their groups removes most of their access automatically. Then search for shares naming them personally, because those will not have gone.
- When somebody changes team, the group move handles it — unless a named share is carrying old access.
- Once a year, look at what is shared with everyone. That list grows quietly and is where a mistake costs most.
The reason named shares are worth hunting down is not that anybody misuses them. It is that nobody can answer “who can see the payroll folder” without reading a list of names, and a question you cannot answer quickly is a control you do not really have.
Where to go next
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us. A question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.