A permission fence allows you to "fence off" a folder, and its subfolders, from inheriting permissions from its parent folders. It allows you to set up new permissions, including new inheritable permissions, within the fenced folder. This gives you greater flexibility for your access permissions and can help when trying to match access permissions from your previous storage solutions.

Permission fences can be created and managed by site administrators and folder administrators.

Permission fences do not apply to, or affect, site administrators. Folder administrators are not affected by permission fences in the folders that they administer.

Permission fences do not apply to notification options such as Email Notifications, SNS Notifications, and Webhooks. These types of notifications can include details of actions that occur within the fence, including metadata such as subfolder names and file names. This also applies to notification settings which are inherited from a parent folder.

Any folder can be configured with a permission fence, even those residing within Remote Mount storage locations, such as folders in Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, and other remote servers.

Permission fences can also be set up within other permission fences, allowing for flexible and granular control of folder permissions.

A permission fence cannot be applied to the root folder of your site.

As an example, imagine that you have a folder structure of /Company/Team A/Manager Only/ and that all members of Team A, including the team manager, are placed in a Files.com group named "Team A". The entire team needs to be able to access content in /Company/Team A/ so the "Team A" group has been given full access permissions to this folder. However, the subfolder /Manager Only/ should be prohibited to the team members with the exception of the manager. By applying a permission fence to /Manager Only/ the inherited permissions are blocked and the team members can no longer see or access that subfolder. You can now give access permission for the /Manager Only/ subfolder to the team manager. Now only the team manager can see and access the /Manager Only/ subfolder, even though the whole team has access to its parent folder.

Creating a Permission Fence

Use the Folder permissions option of a folder to create a permission fence for it.

If there are any inherited permissions that will be blocked by the new fence then a table will be presented that displays the permissions that are about to be blocked.

After the fence has been created, new permissions can be applied within this fenced folder.

Removing a Permission Fence

You can remove a permission fence by using the Folder permissions option of the folder where the fence was created.

If there are any inherited permissions that will be reapplied to this folder when the fence is removed then a table will be presented that displays the permissions that are about to be reapplied.

Removing a permission fence does not remove any permissions that have been applied within the fence. Removing the fence simply allows any inherited permissions from parent folders to no longer be blocked.

Viewing Permission Fence Information

Folders that have a permission fence applied to them will show a fence icon in their Folder permissions button.

Users that are affected by a permission fence will display a fence icon in their Folder permissions information table, which can be found in the user account settings, under the Privileges tab.

Groups that are affected by a permission fence will display a fence icon in their Folder permissions information table, which can be found in the group's settings.

Hovering on the fence icon in the user or group permissions tables will display the path of the folder that contains the fence. Clicking the fence icon will take you to the folder.