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Sharing of folders inside the Apps/ folder

Sharing of folders inside the Apps/ folder

Daan L.
New member | Level 1

I have an application (madoko.net) where users rely on shared folders in dropbox to cooperate.
However, I now need to give the application access to a users' entire dropbox and I would like to make it a restricted application under Apps/Madoko. Unfortunately, currently users are unable to share folders inside the Apps subfolder.
Since the introduction of the recent sharing API I was hoping to see dropbox supporting this too. Is this feature still planned??

Thanks!,
-- Daan

67 Replies 67

New Life F.
New member | Level 1

Try this kinda helps get round th problem 

https://mover.io 

Shows L.
New member | Level 1

It may be a bit simplistic, but it looks like it will be QUITE functional.  Thank you New Life F.!!

And, for personal use, it is Free!  

Jake H.8
New member | Level 1

Huge upvote!

Vitaliy D.
New member | Level 2

I also need this capability... Please add it.

Mike R.17
New member | Level 2

This absolutely NEEDS to happen.

Adina Z.1
Helpful | Level 5

@Steve M - I think you are hearing loud and clear from your customers that this is an important feature for us. I pay more for Dropbox every month than any software or service. Your service comes at a premium and for that we expect leading edge features. It's great to have Apps and integration with other software.. But most of these integrations involve us getting the files so we can SHARE the files on dropbox. If we cant share the files we get access to from your awesome integration coding, or if we have to do a ton of workaround to make sharing possible, the Apps folder is not very useful, and we start to look outside Dropbox to meet our needs. 

Mike R.17
New member | Level 2

@adinaz I could not agree more. It is one of our biggest regrets going with Dropbox from the onset. The API is basically useless for us because we already have a large folder  structure in place, and we can't mimic that structure in any third party systems.

 

For instance, we need to be able to share folders with customers (folders that already exist within our "Team Share" folder), and we'd like them to access the folder through a forward facing Salesforce Community/(Customer Portal). In addition, we'd like certain customers from the same account to have access to only specific folders within their main customer folder.

 

However, this cannot be done, and it has had a real detrimental impact on how we collaborate with our customers.

 

In addition, as our company has grown, we have brought in new employees that should only be able to access specific sub-folders from within our main "Team Share" folder. Since this isn't possible we run into serious issues with having to either move the folder to a completely new "Shared Folder", which causes serious confusion with our current employees, or make a copy of the folder, add it to the top of the folder structure as a "Shared Folder" and cross our fingers that revisions don't get made on duplicate files and go unnoticed (which happens.... a lot).

 

This really is a no brainer. It's both surprising and disappointing that a company which claims to offer "The world's simplest and most powerful platform for collaboration" doesn't offer this functionality. 

Listen to your business users. Having to find constant workarounds for this lack of functionality is not simple. And lastly, I think it is fair to say that some of us are beginning to doubt if Dropbox really is the "most powerful platform for collaboration" after all.

"And that's all I have to say about that."

- (Forrest Gump voice)

 

Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff

Thanks for the additional feedback everyone! We always appreciate hearing from developers and users about features they need, especially with the accompanying context like that which has been provided here.

Daan L.
New member | Level 1

Hi Gregory,

Thanks for giving attention to this topic; however, I feel it is of utmost importance to start supporting this soon. At the root of it is really a security issue.

There is always a tension between security and ease of use; with a coarse grained system like the App folders to restrict access, it is very important that applications get enough functionality. Otherwise, apps will simply always request full access -- you see this all the times with phone apps if the security levels are too coarse.

As soon as  Dropbox supports full sharing of folders whether it is an App folder or not, I can enable my application to use an App folder instead of requiring full access to a user's dropbox. Just a much better solution for every party involved and I hope Dropbox will seriously look at supporting this feature in the near future 🙂

Finally, one can actually emulate this behavior right now by opening multiple dropbox accounts and sharing between them... but of course that is not ideal at all. But it gives a clear idea how all of this can be implemented and how the policies should behave. ie.. Users should be able to share folders inside app folders to be accessible by users that do not have the app, and the other way around.

Hope something will happen soon 🙂  Thanks for making such a great platform!

Rick W.2
New member | Level 2

I thought when I saw the description of the Dropbox API v2 in the email I received yesterday that it will accommodate sharing.  I'm an end user and not a  developer so I'm not completely clear on this, but it seemed to be the solution.

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