Planning Folder Structure
Why plan folder structure?
Organizing your data is vital to your organization's success. Taking the time to plan your account's folder structure and hierarchy can increase user adoption and maximize productivity. The average employee loses 2+ hours looking for misplaced documents and emails on their computer. You can minimize some of these huge loss of time challenges with organization through the use of folders, subfolders, and granular permissions on your ShareFile account.
What is a root level folder?
The root level folder, also called the root directory is the "highest" directory in the hierarchy. Think of it as the start of a particular folder structure. The root directory contains all the folders within the account, and of course, subfolders and files within those folders. You can visualize this by thinking of a tree underground where the roots (the root folders) begin near the surface and they branch down below (the subfolders). The root is what holds together all of its lower items.
Who will be creating the structure?
The ability to create root level folders is dictated by the employee permission ‘Create root-level folders.’ This permission is not for Admin users only. Employees with this permission will be able to create root level folders. To allocate this permission to an existing employee, navigate to People -> Browse Employees -> Select a user’s profile -> Allocate permissions at the bottom of the screen under User Access.
If a user is granted upload rights on a folder, they will have the ability to create subfolders within that folder.
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If you are using the ShareFile User Management Tool to provision users directly from AD, you can allocate the ‘Create root-level folders’ permission to users at the time of group rule creation.
Who will need access?
Understanding who will be accessing the data in a folder structure is extremely important to the planning process. ShareFile allows for sharing folder access with both internal (employees) and external (clients) users. To share a folder with a user, you will need to be an admin user on the folder, or the creator. Simply navigate to that folder location > Select the People on this Folder tab > Add People to Folder > Select the user and assign permissions > Add. See People settings for more information on how to Add People to a Folder.
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You can add users to a folder in bulk by utilizing distribution groups.
Advanced folder settings
As a ShareFile Admin, you have the ability to set account-wide folder defaults within the Account Settings console. These settings will be applied to any net new root-level folders that are created within your account. However, Advanced Folder Settings allows folder Admins to override these defaults to apply custom policies on a per root-level folder basis. See Modify folder options for info on how to Create a Folder and Advanced Folder Options.
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By default, a user given Admin rights at the root-folder level has the ability to adjust the retention policy on that folder (and therefore all subfolders beneath). However, ShareFile offers a setting that can be enabled by ShareFile Support that only allows employee users with ‘Modify account-wide settings’ to adjust folder retention policies via Advanced Folder Settings.
Limitations
The following operational limits and performance recommendations can help you plan your folder structure. The download limit is separate from the recommended folder size and item counts.
- Bulk folder operations: If you have many folders or a deeply nested folder structure, you might not be able to apply folder templates to subfolders or rename existing folders in bulk.
- Folder template processing: Changes to templates associated with many folders can take time to process. Wait for ShareFile to finish processing before leaving the folder template menu.
- Folder downloads: You can download a folder containing up to 50,000 items. Downloading a folder with more items results in the error: "This folder has too many files to download. Try downloading smaller subfolders or individual files."
- File Path Limit
- ShareFile recommends adhering to Microsoft File Path limitations by avoiding path names that exceed 250 characters. Shorten paths by renaming folders and files or moving deep lying folders higher up the tree. This is extremely pertinent if you are planning on deploying the ShareFile for Windows application.
- Horizontal not Vertical
- As mentioned earlier, it is best practice to keep your folder structure spread wide at either the root level or the second level down. This will prevent a narrow, deep structure from evolving that can cause a poor user experience and strain the ShareFile system. These changes can help to disperse items and prevent a folder from hitting the upper limits. This is linked to the number of calls required when adjusting folder settings, user access, and account wide policies. Furthermore, users will lose productivity if they’re required to click through a deep folder tree to access documents.
- File Versioning
- Adjust your file versioning to only keep the last 25 or less files. This can be adjusted from the Account settings under Advanced Preferences > File Settings.
- Limit items in each folder
- ShareFile folders should not contain more than 5,000 items within an individual folder or sub-folders. An “item” includes any elements within a folder. This includes files, folders, additional versions of files, and notes. Additionally, items in the recycle bin from the affected folder before emptied are included in the overall item count. When a folder reaches or exceeds this limitation, the consequences can be detrimental to the account and explicitly the folder in question.
- The impacts could include:
- Inability to upload documents.
- Slow or inaccessible folder operations such as browse, copy, move, delete, and restore.
- Time-outs in Web application
- Inability to temporarily access particular folder
- Temporary account lock out.
- If you are currently experiencing these issues or are approaching these folder limits, please contact support for assistance.
- Folder Size
- ShareFile folders should not contain more than 10GB of data. Exceeding this limit will result to slow folder operation like copy/move/delete/restore.
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Complete Folder Structure Best Practices Document
Download the full folder structure best practices document.