The Users at our school are organized in groups in our Nextcloud (20.0.8).
We have several groups, the most important are:
- teachers: “4400 - Lehrer/innen”
- pupils: “4400 - Schüler/innen”
- a separate group for each class: “4400 - A1”, “4400 - B1”, “4400 - B2” and so on
where “4400” is the official school number and “Xn” the class name.
(Don’t ask me why the group names are gendered, contain special characters and German umlauts. This is a decision made by the school districts administration and we have to use their system with a SAML connection to login to the Nextcloud instance).
What we need, are folders for each class where only the members of the class are allowed to view, create, change, share and delete files/folders and where the teachers can change these rights.
Example:
Class C1 has its own folder. To work with the pupils I normally need two “functions”: Share material/information with students and collect the work they produce.
In the “Share” folder they get the permission “read” in the “Collect” folder the permissions “write”, “change” and, because otherwise they won’t see the folder, “read”.
Because we want this function for all classes we need a top folder called “Classes” as a starting point.
So, the structure looks like this:
Classes ------ A1 ------ share
| | ------ collect
| ------ B1 ...
| ------ B2 ...
| ------ C1 ------ share
| | ------ collect
| ...
Now there are several ways to realize this:
- I create a group folder called “Classes” and add ALL classes “4400 - Xn” as a group to this folder. Means 2 things: 6 classes per year x 9 years = 54 groups to manage. And the GUI cannot handle this in an acceptable manner because all groups in a folder are presented in a LONG line of text side by side
- I create a group folder for each class named “4400 - Xn” and add the appropriate class in the list of groups allowed to use this folder. This means 54 single folders in the admin view and, the more disturbing part, 54 “separate” folders and so no “single” top folder for all classes. This means a lot of navigation trouble for the teachers.
- I don’t use “Group Folders” and try to set this up with standard share functionality. This means, that every teacher is allowed, but not necessarily suitable, to change this.
Update: Because subfolders inherit the rights from their parent I can’t change them.
Any other suggestions?
I’m curious to see your ideas 
Paul