Content

Introduction

To enable a secure and easy-to-use workflow for any user working with data in Research Drive, a Project Folder Owner can set up a folder structure that allows access to individual users or one or more groups of users which can have different functions and permissions.

Introduction

As a Project Folder Owner for a project, you:

  1. Create project structure
    Create a logical folder structure
  2. Manage access to project data
    Grant access permissions on folders to users and groups
  3. Manage user groups
    Creating user groups and adding/removing users

What is a project folder?

A project folder is basically an account, but with the following characteristics:

  1. The project folder has a quota
  2. The project folder is shared with the Project Folder Owner

The reason for this is simple; people move in and out, but projects generally persist for a longer period of time. By making a functional account per project all data in the project folder becomes and remains property of the project account.

The project folder can be shared as needed with any Project Folder Owner or member.

Additionally, billing becomes easier because you can do this per project folder, for example when an internal billing system bills per usage on a project basis.

Projects

Each project can have one Project Folder Owners, where multiple projects can have the same Project Folder Owner.

In fact, a likely scenario would be for the group admin to be the Project Folder Owner for all the projects of your organisation.

In other situations, the Primary Investigator will be the Project Folder Owner for the project.

Start with a new project folder

A new project folder can be created by a Research Drive user with the role Contract Admin or Dashboard Admin via the Research Drive Dashboard.

Example: examine your project folder

When you log in as a Project Folder Owner, you should see the project folder:


As you can see, it is empty at the moment, 0 KB in size. It is also not shared with anyone but you.


Establish the folder structure in the project folder

The Project Folder Owner can initially create a folder structure based on the project's needs and sharing requirements. See how to create your folder structure for more information.

Example: create directory structure

Let's create an example directory structure inside this folder. For this purpose, we'll create some folders that need different access permissions for different groups of people:


The key point is, that researchers need write access to raw and processed data. Students need read permissions on raw data, but write permissions on processed data.

For example, students should be able to write their homework assignments, but not read the exam answers. Employees of the company that build the machine that goes 'ping' need read access to the processed data.

Share the project folder

In order to make management of permissions and users easier, Research Drive allows a Project Folder Owner to create groups that contain multiple users. These group can then be selected when sharing folders.

A Project Folder Owner can create as many groups as is needed. A user can be added to as many groups as needed.

Example: Create group
Custom groups

To create a custom group, go to 'settings' in the top right corner menu. Now click on 'Custom groups' in the left pane:

Here we can create groups and add users to them. In this example, we created the groups researchers, students and externalcompany. We added the user accounts to the applicable groups.

Note

You can add users to multiple groups, but you can't add groups to groups.

Permissions

Now that we have groups, let's go back to our project folder. By clicking the 'share' icon () you can add groups and set permissions. Here we gave the researchers write access to the raw data, and the students read-only access: