How do I manage my team’s access to Dropbox?
No matter how big your team is, as a Dropbox team admin you have plenty of options for managing Dropbox access.
13 minute read
Managing made easy
Whether you’re adding or removing members of your team, Dropbox team accounts make user management easy.
Managing members vs. groups
If you have a big team, creating groups is a great way to organize your team members. Knowing how to manage individual members and groups from the admin console will help you stay organized.
Get everyone on board
Do you use Active Directory? Great! You can use the Dropbox AD Connector to easily provision, de-provision, and manage users and groups in Dropbox.
Note: The Dropbox AD Connector is available to Dropbox teams on an Advanced or Enterprise plan.
Changes in your AD Connector are reflected in Dropbox, but won’t alter any files or content in your Dropbox account. This is also known as one-way sync.
Tip: Set up a user sync and a separate group sync when you set up your AD with Dropbox. This will offer you more flexibility when it comes to provisioning users.
With Dropbox, there are many ways to provision users, in addition to the AD Connector, such as the admin console and IAM/IdP. Choose what’s best for you (and know that some of these methods require a little bit of technical knowledge, too).
Do you use Active Directory? Great! You can use the Dropbox AD Connector to easily provision, de-provision, and manage users and groups in Dropbox.
The AD Connector works like a mirror, which reflects changes in your AD to your Dropbox. We call this one-way sync, but know that the AD Connector will never actually alter files or content in a Dropbox account.
Here’s a tip: set up a user sync and a separate group sync when you set up your AD with Dropbox. This will offer you more flexibility when it comes to provisioning users.
With Dropbox, there are many ways to provision users, in addition to the AD Connector, such as the admin console and IAM/IdP. Choose what’s best for you (and know that some of these methods require a little bit of technical knowledge, too).
Identify yourself
If you’re already using an identity management provider or have a complex, multi-forest Active Directory you want to keep, you can connect them to your Dropbox account.
Identity managers (IDMs)
Identity management offers admins a robust set of tools designed to simplify user lifecycle operations, including creating and removing Dropbox accounts.
Learn which identity providers offer preconfigured settings for Dropbox.
Single sign-on (SSO)
Single sign-on (SSO) is available to Dropbox teams on an Advanced or Enterprise plan.
SSO lets your team log in to Dropbox with a central identity provider. This makes life easier for your users—it gives them one less password to remember. If you’re already using an identity provider you trust and one that Dropbox supports, setting this up is easy. If you also manage SSO with your Cloud IDM, you can easily manage everything with your IDM provider.
Suspend user and remote wipe
There are two ways to remove a user’s access to your Dropbox team, and methods are accessible through the admin console.
Suspend users
Suspending a user means that they instantly lose access to their Dropbox team account and Paper docs. Only an admin can remove the suspension.
Suspending an account doesn’t free up a license, or delete any files. The account still exists, which means it’s still using that license. To free up the license, you’ll need to delete the account.
Remote wipe
Remote wipe lets you delete a Dropbox team account from a team member’s linked devices. With this feature, you can delete data from a device even if your team member loses it.
Once you unlink a device and use remote wipe, that device will immediately stop syncing.
Restore deleted
Did you accidentally remove a team member? Didn’t mean to delete someone? No problem!
Dropbox team admins have seven days to restore any deleted users.
Restoring a member reactivates the account with the same files and permissions, so the account is exactly as it was before deletion.
It’s like nothing even happened.
Note: Team admins and user management admins can restore deleted users.
How to merge Dropbox teams
If there’s more than one Dropbox team in your organization, or maybe you’re working closely with another team, you might want to merge these two separate teams into one.
How to add existing Dropbox users to your team
Invite your team member as you would any new member. If they choose to join the team, they’ll be prompted to decide what they want to do with their existing files: merge their files with the Dropbox team account or create a separate personal Dropbox account for their files.
Also, keep in mind that if that team member is part of an existing Dropbox team, they can’t join a second team (using the same email address.)