U-M Box and Google Drive: Ownership and Permissions

Overview

While both U-M Box and Google Drive are great for maintaining a shared document repository, ownership and permissions settings (including inheritance of these settings between top-level folders and their sub-folders) works very differently in each.

Definition of Cascading Ownership & Cascading Permissions

When changes to ownership (who owns the content) or permissions (collaborators and access levels) are made to a top-level (parent) folder, those changes are automatically applied to all content within the top-level folder, including any sub-folders.

Functionality comparison

	U-M Box	Google Drive
Cascading ownership?	Yes	No
Cascading permissions?	Yes	Yes
Ownership and permissions settings	Can only be set on a folder (not an individual file, unless it is a Box Notes file)	Can be set on any file or folder
How is ownership set?	Set at the top-level (parent) folder and is automatically applied to all (child) subfolders.	Creator of each file/folder is automatically set as Owner. Ownership changes must be manually applied to each file.
When new content is uploaded to a subfolder, who is set as Owner?	The Owner of the top-level folder automatically becomes the owner.	The person who uploads the content is automatically the Owner.
Who can transfer ownership of a file/folder?	Only the current Owner	Only the current Owner
Changing permissions on subfolders/files	Can be changed, but cannot be more restrictive than the permissions set at top-level folder.	Can be changed as desired, regardless of the permissions set for top-level folder.