Box is the only system that I have ever encountered that has permission inheritance work up as well as down. Typically, a "child" inherits from the "parent", and not the other way around. This behavior makes it difficult to share files with collaborators without giving them more permissions than they need. E.g., We want everyone to have View rights on a Budget folder, but Edit rights only in the current subfolder. But when we make someone an Editor on the subfolder, they are promoted to an Editor on the parent folder, and every other subfolder. I have brought up this behavior to tech support several times and each time I'm told "that's just the way it works". The workaround of breaking a subfolder out isn't a very efficient solution.

If I understand this correctly, this is something that would make things easier in my company with our current folder structure templates that we (try to) use.

You could keep the waterfall permission structure and introduce a feature, to restrict users/groups from files/folders, that would have precedence.

There are already classifications that can override the main permissions, so it should not be so complicated to add a function - restrict, that would be used exactly the same as the share function.

The lack of support for this feature makes it difficult to enforce least privilege access to child folders. It's pretty surprising that with so many other good security features that Box does not support this.

It is the main reason why we are looking at Dropbox. Would like to see this feature.

Absolutely an oversight to not allow this in some form. Simple example, if you want to have a folder of reports, or sales, or salary info for each employee, you would have to have one folder for EACH employe at the top level of your file heirarchy. Can we put them all in a folder marked "Employee sales reports" or whatever? NO. Because then EVERYONE could see everyone elses information. This is broken. Other services allow it. MUST be resolved.

Unbelievable that this was presented to Box back in 2016 and still no progress. I understand if you do not want to offer this feature to your free users or lower tier customers, but for ENTERPRISE users this should be an option.

I find it hard to believe that this would require significant resources to develop. All competitors already have this feature in place. No need to reinvent the wheel here.

Think it is time to reconsider near-term roadmap!

Absolutely unbelievable that this is not available. Will probably need to switch services.

It is enormously inconvenient not to be able to give someone "viewer" access to some files/folders and "editor" access to others. This ridiculous permission scheme -- which is totally out of sync with industry-standard cloud storage (Dropbox, Drive)--results in absurd proliferation of top-level files and folders which could all be avoided with simple granular permissions at every level.

Seriously Box, you need to join the new age of security. Even Google Drive allows you to break the waterfall. Please, let me continue to use Box as it is so superior to any other platform, with is one glaring exception.

Wish it were available. Have folder structure shared across firm but want to give certain folders/files access to certain people and can't. so frustrating.

This is such a shame and needed feature. How on earth can we manage confidential folders without breaking inheritance.

how is breaking inheritance still not implemented?

Just terrible

This would be very helpful

I agree with all of the comments below. This would be very useful for what I need to do!

Agree with all comments below, the understanding was that individual folders would follow parent folder permissions but that folders lower down could have individual permissions. This is quite a fundamental issue with a company wide folder structure.

We have a single file that needs to be locked to be prevented from download due to being proprietary. But it belongs in the patient folder, not elsewhere. To store it elsewhere is illogical, but if we store it in the file that has anything higher than Viewer permission, a person can unlock it and they have access. It is a little tricky when you have hundreds of files that you WANT your collaborators to have full access to, but one single file you wish they could view, but not download or edit, so you can't keep it in that folder, you have to put it in a folder higher up, which is not convenient (or causes hindreds of folders to appear to collaborators instead of single folders).

This is a key feature our company needs. When we purchased Box, we were told that you can share sub folders with specific people and not others. While you can do this, it ultimately becomes useless as in each individual's root folder structure, they will only see that sub folder and end up having hundreds of folders in their account.

as commented below, we are using BOX for our project filing and if external collaborators have access to the Shared folder in multiple project files, we then have to add the project number and title to every shared folder so they know what it is for, thereby extending the file path and causing problems on Box Drive.
It would be a lot easier if we could add collaborators to the parent folder and restrict access to relevant folders within, so they could see the file structure.