Today, we waste a LOT of time if an owner leaves the company but didn't know (or care) about that they have to change the Owner to another person. The average Box user assumes Owner and Co-owner are the same (they don't realize that there is a difference).

Can we please change the policy that when an owner leaves the company that it defaults to one of the co-owners? It's VERY disruptive to lose access to Box folders now that a lot of our work is there; it's the main collaborative space. Plus no one likely remembers folder numbers, which is the way we're supposed to ask to restore access. People often delete the email when they are added to a Box folder. Sometimes, it takes weeks or months to even realize that some content can no longer be accessed and it is only kept for a limited time.

Please reconsider this method and help users not lose hours of work just trying to get to files they need or even worse lose the work all together! Co-owners were trusted with the content before the owner left, letting them now own the content doesn't seem to be much of a stretch. You could even do a double-check with the new owner's manager to see if they should be approved, which would at least save the step of requesting approval and knowing the folder number. This will also save time for people who are processing the 'restore access' requests.

As the UKI Consulting Audit Focal we are looking at the issue that BOX is currently the recommended place for accounts and projects/programmes to store their Project Control Book (the place where all the project records and auditable evidences are held). IBM as an organisation has corporate and legal requirements around data retention. We need to mitigate the risk of losing key information when someone leaves IBM by automatically moving ownership to the Co-Owner of BOX folders.

Regarding: It would be helpful to clarify what we mean by "deactivating."
We are a large organization, with employees leaving frequently.
When an employee leaves, their account is deactivated.
As a result, we have many tickets (1-2 per day) asking for a folder to be reinstated.
You do have best practice recommendations (https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043694514-Deleting-Managed-Users, https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043693014-Best-Practice-Terminating-Employees), but that is impractical when a user owns many folders.
It would greatly help us if, by default, when an account is deactivated, one co-owner is made the owner (this is what our help desk does when users request recovery of a "lost" folder). If there is more than one co-owner, pick one at random to be the new owner.
If there are no co-owners, pick an editor at random and make them the owner.
Folders belonging to deactivated users remain for 180 days, and then are deleted. We've had instances of data loss because a folder wasn't identified as lost within 180 days.
Many thanks for considering this.

Transferring all content to someone else is not scalable in a large organisation.

Assuming most users have mostly personal notes that are not relevant once they leave the organisation and a smaller amount of stuff that is shared with a team or department and needed after the user leaves. A smaller percentage of users own critical shared folders.

In a large organisation there is a need for a standardised process, as there are too many users coming and going to handle each case individually.
Imagine a process where all content owned by a deleted user is always transferred to the manager of that user. In this case managers would have to delete 90% of the stuff they get transferred, to ensure those 10% that is relevant to keep is not deleted. That is a lot of time wasted sifting through mostly useless stuff.

This problem could be solved by allowing Box to automatically transfer ownership of a shared folder if one or more co-owners exists (select one randomly if there are multiple).
Most people I have talked to about this issue seems to assume that is how co-ownership works in the first place and are surprised to learn it is not how it works. So it seems like an intuitive feature.

It would be helpful to clarify what we mean by "deactivating." If we are talking about:
(1) Deleting Managed Users and preserving permissions to content for all Invited Collaborators, then this is already possible today. We simply transfer content to someone else, and this is built into our workflow when deleting Managed Users. All access and permissions for Invited Collaborators is preserved.

https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043694514-Deleting-Managed-Users

(2) or marking a Managed User as Inactive. When marking an account as Inactive, this will freeze the user’s account, preventing them from making changes to any files. Their content will be frozen for all collaborators too, and Box Sync will also be disabled for the user.

https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043693014-Best-Practice-Terminating-Employees

It would be nice to have a third option where we can mark an account as "Inactive, but Invited Collaborators still have access to content."

hi - Can we have an update on this?