You’ve probably noticed that the latest ownCloud now includes a Group Admin feature. We added this feature so admins could create users to manage the membership in one or many groups. Now, group admins have the same user management rights as administrators over a specified group, with the exception that they can’t access system settings. And, of course, they can’t override corporate directory usernames and passwords.
Great. Why should I care?
One basic answer: collaboration – both inside and outside the organization. You see, many employees regularly work with people inside and outside of their organization. Those outside the organization can be suppliers, designers, contractors – they don’t need full access to anything in the system, and they often are not even registered IT users, but they still need to share files. Email doesn’t work, and internal solutions don’t work either – these folks are outside of the organization. Today they usually fall back on a cloud solution just because it’s easier, even though it is not particularly secure.
Now, instead of reverting to insecure apps with third-party storage, selected ownCloud users can manage projects as groups and easily collaborate with people outside the organization. The ownCloud authentication mechanism enables full audit logging and control, and voila – collaborating just got a lot easier. No more documents leaking out to the cloud without your knowledge, and collaboration continues. There are, of course, other use cases, like multi-tenancy, corporate visitors and more, this is just one example.
And now you have another reason to install ownCloud on your servers and gain back the control, flexibility and accountability that you can’t have with an iPad app and third-party storage. Enjoy!
Screenshots
The Admin can assign Group Admin rights to users. Group Admins can control and add to groups they are assigned to
