Tech Tip: Folder Tunneling
By: Sarah Seene
Technical Writer
Laserfiche lets you make documents and folders available to users right where they expect to find them. Sometimes you will want to give users or groups access to folders that are ‘buried’ in folders to which they don’t have access. For example, you might want users to be able to access their personal folders, but not the department folder in which they reside. Or you might want to give one department access to a single sub-folder that resides in another department’s folder. You can do this by creating a shortcut to the desired folder, and placing the shortcut in a folder that the user or group can access. This way, you can give the user or group access to the shortcut’s target but not any of the folders in between.
Example: You want to create a folder for Jane’s retirement fund information, called Jane Smith 401k, within the Human Resources folder. However, you want to only grant Jane Smith the ability to see her own folder, not the Human Resources folder itself. By creating a shortcut to the Jane Smith 401K folder in Jane’s personal folder (which she has access to), Jane will be able to follow the shortcut to her 401k folder and search for her 401k folder—even though she can’t browse to her folder by going to the Human Resources folder. This configuration is useful because you don’t need to explicitly deny Jane access to all the other folders within the Human Resources folder, but simply grant access where it is needed. This, in turn, simplifies the repository’s overall security policy.
Folder tunneling adds great flexibility in setting up repositories. Potentially complicated and time-consuming modifications to the overall security setup of the repository can be avoided in cases where certain users should be granted access to specific pieces of information in an otherwise confidential parent folder.
