If you remember I made a post about the Document ownership (you can find this blog here)
Beside document ownership, user can own a folder. Usually folder creator is an owner of that folder.

So what can you do if you are the owner of a folder?

  • For folders inside your owning folder, you can just as much as Access control lets you do. If you only have right to read documents and folders, you will not be able to make any modifications.
  • For documents inside your owning folder, you can do anything you like if you can find it.

How does that work for that second bullet? The owner of the folder has same rights to the document which is in that folder as an owner of the document. That means that if the folder's owner can find the document (has a document right to read) he can change the permissions or change the owner for that document to himself or anybody.

The Interesting part is that this folder ownership is transferred down the folder path. That means all the owners of folders that are at the higher level of the document to the root will have owner rights for the document.

Example:
pw://PWServer.bentley.com:Datasource/Documents/Test/folder1/folder2/test.doc
A test.doc document is in Test/folder1/folder2 folder.
Folder Test owner is user1.
Folder folder1 owner is user2.
Folder folder2 owner is user3.
Document test owner is user4.

No matter what right is set for the document if any of the folder owner (user1, user2, user3) can find test.doc they can change the ownership and permissions for test.doc document.

So keep in mind, if you give a right to create subfolder to a user, you also give owner right to all documents that will be created inside of the folders that user will create.

JP