Sharing an entire folder tree made easy! GroupWise Ascot!

Sharing a single folder in GroupWise has always been fairly easy and straight forward. You simple right-click on the folder you want to share, choose ‘Sharing’ from the menu and follow the simple wizard. You can easily assign rights to the folder so that recipients of the folder can easily add/edit/delete the contents of the folder. You choose the users or even a group of users and each person can be assigned individual rights and access. Sharing a folder has been a feature of GroupWise for a long long time.

However, many of our users have requested the ability to not simply share a single folder, but to share an entire folder tree. Meaning that if you have a folder and it contains sub-folders (which in turn, could also have sub-folders), the process to ‘share’ each and every folder to the same group of individuals with the same exact rights for each user and each folder, was tedious and somewhat cumbersome.

Introducing GroupWise Ascot – with ‘Shared Folder Trees’! Now if you have a set of folders you want to share to all of the same people with all of the same rights – you can simply nest those folders together in a folder tree and then ‘Share’ the outermost folder and all of the sub-folders – no matter how deep the folder tree is – will all be shared to all recipients with the exact same access rights as defined for the outer most tree. Cool huh?

Note: There is a small checkbox on the first screen of the Share wizard that allows you to optionally share just the folder or share all sub-folders as well.

If you drag and drop (or move) a folder into the folder tree, it will automatically be shared with the same rights. If you drag and drop or move a folder from the ‘Shared Tree’, the shared will be revoked and all rights and shares will be removed. This feature is backward compatible such that if one user has the GroupWise Ascot Windows Client and they share a folder tree, the recipients on older clients will still have the entire folder tree shared with them.

Once you share the Folder Tree – it now acts as a single unit…meaning that all rights, shares, access are now controlled by the outermost folder. You can not individually make exceptions for any of the nested folders. If you right-click on a sub-folder that has been included in a folder tree share, you will get a ‘read-only’ dialog that only lets you see the ‘Share list’ and the rights for each user.

As I spoke with the engineer, Kent, who implemented this feature he shared with me some of the details involved in making sure this feature is backward compatible.

for example...

1) Underneath we actually do a share of each folder in the tree. So if you are using Ascot and you share a folder tree with users with older clients and agents, they will see and be able to accept (or decline) individual shared folder requests for each folder. Of course, as already mentioned, other Ascot users will see a collapsed single share and be able to operate on the entire tree.

2) Recipients are still allowed to name their shared folder references anything that they wish and place them anywhere that they wish. This is nice functionality to keep, but the cost is that the changes that the owner makes after the initial share are ignored in favor of what the recipient has. In other words, the original tree share will be a single accept by the recipient, who can place the entire tree anywhere they want.

This means that folders added to the share by the owner will auto-accept into the recipients tree. But changes by the owner to the placement and name of existing folders in the tree will not be pushed to the recipient and will not override what the recipient has chosen to do with their reference folders after they have accepted them. Nor are the changes made by recipients to the names and placements of the folders pushed back to the owner.

This results in giving the recipient the control to organize as they see fit, but at the cost of the tree being kept in "full structural sync"

Let us know if you have questions or if you want to know specifically how this feature will work in a particular situation within your organization.

Ascot is coming!!

Dean