How to create a group share like SharePoint Online?

ℹ️ Support
1

In Office 365, it is extremely easy for an Admin to create a shared drive and select owners and members for said drive.

The icons used in Windows Explorer make it abundantly clear which shares are group shares (basically like file servers) that an individual has access to, and what is his/her own personal space.

How can that be achieved in Nextcloud?

Typical use cases would be:

  1. Shared office files (everyone in the office should have access)
  2. Project files (everyone assigned to a certain project should have access)
  3. Management files (everyone in the management team should have access, everyone else should not)

Naturally, such folders should NEVER “live” inside the space of a certain user. So creating a folder inside the “documents” folder of a given user and simply sharing that folder with a group is NOT the solution at all.

In Office 365, creating file shares is extremely simple.
But how is that done in NC?

There is only THREE things that Microsoft does poorly:

  1. It relies on Microsoft servers that are subject to legislation of foreign adversaries (Cloud Act, for example). Hence the need for products like NC.
  2. When an admin creates a new SharePoint site and adds a member, this SharePoint site does NOT automatically show up in his/her Windows Explorer as new shared folder. Instead, the user must sync each SharePoint site individually / manually. This may be OK for tech savvy user but is EXTREMELY cumbersome for non-tech users. For most, any new shared drive should just “show up” without the user having to do anything. Just like a Shared Mailbox automatically appears in the user’s Outlook as soon as the admin grants access. Zero user intervention required.
  3. When an admin revokes access to a SharePoint site, the local copy of that site still remains on the users hard drive. Sure, it is not updated anymore, but a local copy as per the timestamp of the access revocation remains on the system of the user. That is extzremely poor architecture. When a user loses access to a shared drive, the local copy of said drive should be wiped off his/her hard drive automatically.

I could not find any manual indicating that NC can even do what SharePoint has been doing for 10+ years. Is that because there is no feature for shared drives? Or what am I missing?

2

It sounds like you may be looking for the functionality of either the Group Folders app (available in the app store) or, possibly,Teams (formerly Circles). The latter is in core.

3

Thank you for your quick and very helpful reply.
Yes, I think the group folders App is the closest to what I was looking for.

However, some things confuse me:

  1. Why is that an App? This functionality should absolutely be core, IMO. If you had not told me about it, I would have had to conclude that NC does not support this very basic feature at all.
  2. When I create a Group Folder as Admin and add a Group consisting of the admin and my regular user account to it with full permissions, I can see the new group folder in the group folders section of the admin.
  3. But when I log in as my regular user, the group folders section is empty. No group folder is shown anywhere.
  4. Also, no group folder is synchronized with File Explorer through the Desktop client. This should happen automatically when a user is added to a group folder: that folder should pop up in File Explorer immediately and automatically by default.
  5. Even when I am logged in as admin, the group folders section in the navigation bar does not seem to have a tree view. The personal folders can be un-collapsed in the nav pane, but the group folders can not. Its the very same nav pane on the left, but two different types of behaviour for the very same thing (folders)???
  6. Also, even as admin, I cant create a new file inside that group folder.

Seems rather buggy still, with room for improvement in the usability space? I am using the latest AIO, by the way (30.0.4).