Transfer ownership of a file
I was blown away that I can't change the ownership of "files", only folders. We have a user that retired and we need to transfer ownership of all her content to other employees (not just a single employee). Transferring ownership of a "folder" is easy and straightforward.
Box has a limitation that prevents you from transferring ownership of an individual file. This user has about 40 files at their root of her account (under All Files). The only way to change ownership is to move the file into a folder and then share and change the ownership of the folder. That's ridiculous and super time consuming!!
All of these files have different permissions and can't be copied into a single folder in this case. I have to create 40 separate folders, copy each individual file into each corresponding folder, share the folder with whoever the new owner will be and then transfer ownership of the folder to the new owner.
Tony Ford
shared this idea
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BlackRoseEvy
commented
The ability to transfer ownership of individual files is a critical need for effectively managing our Box content at the University of Arizona. While we can reassign ownership of folders when users leave the institution, the inability to do the same for standalone files creates unnecessary roadblocks, delays, and risks of data loss.
Currently, there is no straightforward method to transfer file ownership—leaving admins without an efficient or scalable solution. This issue arises every time a user’s status changes to “former” based on EDS data attributes, which can occur as often as 3–5 times per month—or even weekly—depending on the volume of user transitions.
Enabling file ownership transfers, either through the Admin Console’s Content Manager or by allowing changes while logged in as the user, would significantly improve our administrative efficiency, reduce support overhead, and ensure continued access to institutional data.
Please consider adding this feature to the roadmap. Thank you.
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Anonymous
commented
Discussed this Adam Liranzo
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Jennifer Thi
commented
The Delete & Transfer Content is insufficient because it only transfer ownership of folders the inactive user owns. It doesn't transfer their other collaborative permissions such as folders where they are an editor or co-owner.
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Jasmine Wade
commented
I understand that we can transfer ownership but that means when we are deleting a 'user' account after a termination, we have to look through
every folder to and transfer the shared ones to a new owner.We are trying to avoid that because it can be tedious. We do not want to micromanage shared content.