External Users
last updated Aug 26, 2022
Availability
- Server v2106 and above
- Storage Made Easy EU and US SaaS since April 2021
Overview
External users can be invited to create their own account on the appliance, with their own personal password, that allows files to be shared with them securely from the same appliance. When creating a share link an internal user, a member of your organization, will select the external user from the drop-down “Who can access”. The external user, when they click the share link, will authenticate themselves by logging into the appliance own personal password.
External Users can participate in Business Groups and can be authenticated users of Shared Links.
Organization Administration
To manage the external users belonging to your organization, as the organization administrator navigate to the Users screen from your Organization dashboard.
You will observe a second tab on this screen detailing the external users. From here you can see the external users belonging to your organization. You will be able to add and delete external users from here. When an external user is deleted, ownership of their files will be reassigned to the administrator of the organization.
Enabling External Users
Prerequisites
The following are the prerequisites for the External Users feature:
- Enterprise File Fabric customers: A File Fabric license key that contains a quota greater than zero for 'External Users'
- Storage Made Easy SaaS Customers: An Organization package with the feature enabled
- Appliance setting: Business Groups must be enabled.
- The Organization File Sharing Policy policy 'Business Groups' must be enabled.
License Key
On-premises Enterprise File Fabric customers, login with the ApplAdmin account. Navigate to:
Settings > License Key
From the License Key screen, if you see an external user quota with a value greater than zero then the feature is available for use.
IaaS and SaaS Enterprise File Fabric customers, contact SME Support to find out whether your organization can have External Users.
Appliance Administrator
There are four required elements for enabling access for external users:
- Business Groups must be enabled.
- A special package denoted for External Users must be configured in the File Fabric.
- Storage must be configured for the External Users if they will be allowed to upload files. Appliance Default Storage must be used for this purpose. Appliance default storage can be configured by the appliance administrator on the Storage page which is accessed from the settings menu:
- An allowed number of external users (greater than 0) must be configured within the standard organization package (not the External Users package) that is assigned to an organization that wants to use External User Collaboration.
- Under Organization > Policies > File Sharing Policy the option 'Business Groups' must be enabled.
To set up the External User package, navigate to the Packages screen. If you do not have a package yet for external users, the user interface will offer assistance to help you create one if your license key permits use of the feature. Follow the steps on screen to create the package. Note that there can only be one External User package per File Fabric installation.
External users have access to a limited set of features, and the limited package options for external users reflect this.
To set up the organization's package navigate back to the Packages screen. From here, you can set the Max count of external users for the package.
Organization Administration
To manage the external users belonging to your organization, as the organization administrator navigate to the Users screen from your Organization dashboard.
You will observe a second tab on this screen detailing the external users. From here you can see the external users belonging to your organization. You will be able to add and delete external users from here. When an external user is deleted, ownership of their files will be reassigned to the administrator of the organization.