Cabinets

Team accounts only

The concepts and features described on this page apply only to team accounts.

In a team environment, documents are typically handled collectively by multiple people. When teams, departments or other groups of people need access to the same documents, use a cabinet. A cabinet is a container for documents shared within an organization: documents placed in a cabinet are owned by that cabinet, and whoever has access to the cabinet gets access to its documents.

Required permissions

• Open the Cabinets pageCabinetsView
• Create a cabinetCabinetsCreate
• Edit a cabinetCabinetsUpdate
• Delete a cabinetCabinetsDelete
• Manage who has access to a cabinetCabinetsManage Access
• Create and edit tags, categories and metadata owned by a cabinetCabinetsManage Resources

Cabinets | View and Cabinets | Manage Access have a different reach in a company-wide role than in a cabinet role. See Roles & Permissions.

Ownership and Access

Cabinets have two separate mechanisms for controlling who can work with them:

Ownership determines who owns the cabinet. Owners always have full access. Ownership can be assigned to one or more individual users or to groups. Group ownership is the recommended approach for teams: add a user to the group and they immediately gain access to all cabinets that group owns; remove them and access is revoked automatically. For example, in a small team of three people, create a group “all-users” and make it the owner of the cabinet “Acme”.

Note

The owners of the cabinet have full access to the documents placed in that cabinet.

Access entries allow non-owners to be granted a specific role on a cabinet. A role defines what the principal (user or group) is allowed to do. For example, you can give an external auditor view-only access to the Finance cabinet without making them an owner.

Cabinet owners have all permissions on the cabinet implicitly. A user granted access via a role only has the permissions that role includes.

Cabinets and Their Special Folders

Every document in Papermerge must live in a folder. For documents owned by a user, that folder is their personal home (or inbox). Like users, cabinets have their own special folders: home and inbox.

Ownership Transfer

Everything placed in a cabinet’s home or inbox folder is owned by that cabinet.

Uploads become cabinet-owned automatically. For example, if lila uploads a document into the HR cabinet’s home folder, that document is owned by the HR cabinet — not by lila.

Existing documents change owner only after you confirm it. Moving a document from your own home into a cabinet also transfers the ownership of the document to the cabinet. The same happens when you assign a category that belongs to a cabinet (see below). Because these operations change who can access the document, you will be asked to explicitly approve the transfer.

Tags, Categories and Metadata

Note

This is an advanced feature suitable for bigger teams (e.g. more than 15 users).

In bigger teams, some departments may have sensitive resources (e.g. the Finance team may have a “high-salary” tag) which they don’t want to share with users from other departments. This is possible by making resources (tags, metadata, categories) owned by a cabinet to which only specific users have access.

Tags, categories, and metadata can be owned by a cabinet. When creating any of these, if you have the Cabinets | Manage Resources permission on one or more cabinets, you may assign a cabinet as the owner of that tag (category, metadata).

Ownership of tags, categories, and metadata determines visibility: these items are only visible to users who have access to that cabinet. This means:

• A tag owned by the HR cabinet is only visible to users who have access to that cabinet.
• A category owned by the HR cabinet files its documents into the HR cabinet. Assigning it to a document moves the document there; you will be asked to confirm the transfer.
• Metadata owned by the HR cabinet is only available when working with categories owned by the HR cabinet.

In short: what belongs to the cabinet is visible only to the people with access to that cabinet.