Unsharing Folder causes projects to appear on left panel
Our top level folder includes projects for this current year. We’ve placed past years in a folder titled “Archive”. As the admin, I’ve unshared this archive folder from the majority of team members as they rarely need to access it. However, when I unshare the folders, some team members have a plethora of child projects displayed on the left hand project panel in no order and out of a parent folder causing a bit of a mess. If I unshare the parent folder shouldn’t this automatically keep them from seeing accessing those projects?
Thanks
Hi Jonathan,
This is a common struggle with sharing. Since regular users are able to share folders with other users, it's important to make sure everyone understands how sharing works. Since sharing is a top down action, meaning if I share a folder with someone they will inherit everything underneath, I recommend building some processes and training to prevent users from sharing sub-folders when they should be sharing the parent folder/project.
In your example, I'm assuming what's happened is you un-share the parent folder and move it to the Archive folder, users are seeing other folders under that parent that were shared with them directly by someone else.
I've dealt with this so often I'm pretty confident that's what's going on. I usually sit with the affected users, look at their folders that are creating a mess in their folder list, and identify that someone has shared those folders with them directly.
To get around this we created a great project setup template and process that clearly shows people what to share and what not to share. Coupled with training we've been able to mitigate most of the issues. Then every month we have a process to review our folder sharing and clean up any issues that creep in (because as good as our processes and training are, it still happens from time to time).
There is also an interesting labs feature available if you're on the Enterprise plan called Selective Sharing. Check it out: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/210322745-Selective-Sharing
Hope this helps. Would love to see your response and to hear what others are doing to keep sharing under control.
If you have moved folders that used to be part of another folder, and your team had those folders shared with them prior to the move into your archieve folder then they will keep those permissions and inherit any new permissions from the new parent folder. When removing permissions at the new parent folder level the child folders will keep their old permissions intact, thus creating the headach of all the folders. I am not sure of a way to remove permissions from child folders all the way through. It may have to do with inherited settings. Have you looked into that?
Hope that helps.
-Ryan