Considerations and Requirements for Salesforce Enhanced Folder Sharing in Reports and Dashboards

Analytics Enhanced Folder Sharing

Enhanced Folder Sharing grants fine-grained access to reports and dashboard folders and offers the following benefits:
 

• Makes sharing concepts more consistent with User, Role, or Group Sharing
• Allows sharing with individual users
• Provides fine-grained access levels for each folder share (View, Edit, Manage)
• Provides a symmetric set of profile permissions for both reports and dashboards

Enhanced folder Sharing offers 3 access levels for Report and Dashboards folders:
 

Viewer

• View a folder in the folder tree
• View all contents (Run Report, Refresh Dashboard)

Editor

• Everything from Viewer access plus:
  • Edit all contents of a folder
  • Add contents to folder
  • Delete contents from folder

Manager

• Everything from Editor access plus:
  • Edit folder name
  • Edit/delete/remove shares

5 symmetric profile permissions for reports and dashboards

• Manage Reports in Public Folders, Manage Dashboards in Public Folders
• View Reports in Public Folders, View Dashboards in Public Folders
• Create Report Folders, Create Dashboard Folders
• Edit My Reports, Edit My Dashboards
• Create and Customize Reports, Create and Customize Dashboards

For more details on each of these profile permissions, please refer to Compare Access Levels for Report and Dashboard Folders.

 

Old profile permissions mapped to enhanced sharing profile permissions

When Enhanced Folder Sharing is in effect, all users in the Organization by default get Viewer access to report and dashboard folders that are shared with them. Also, "old” profile permissions are mapped to enhanced sharing profile permissions as closely as possible without giving users any additional capabilities than they previously had. 

 

Good to know: The Enhanced Folder Sharing option doesn't have any impact on My Personal Custom Reports and My Personal Dashboards. These will remain private to the user. For the reports in Unfiled Public Reports, users will be able to:
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• Create new reports and edit any reports that they created
• Edit any reports that they created
• Edit other people’s reports if they have Editor or Manager access to the folder

Before enabling analytics folder sharing

• Purge inactive reports and dashboards that have not been run for a long time (over 18 months or 2 years). You can get a list of all inactive reports by creating a report of type "Reports" under the Administrative Reports Folder
• Delete empty report and dashboard folders

After enabling analytics folder sharing

• Make any necessary changes to profile permissions as needed, if the default mapping does not meet your organization's needs.
• Make any necessary changes to access levels on folders if default Viewer access does not meet your organization’s needs. This can be achieved manually or through a MD API code.
• Grant View Reports in Public Folders, Create Report Folders, Manage Reports in Public Folders, View Dashboards in Public Folders, Create Dashboard Folders and Manage Dashboards in Public Folders permission only to a select few users.
• Grant Edit My Reports profile permission to profiles that have Create and Customize Reports permission. This would give users the ability to edit, save, delete and move out reports they created in folders they only have “viewer” access.
• Grant Editor/Manager Access to folders as needed if the default Viewer access to folders does not meet your users’ needs.
• Place reports used in shared/cloned dashboards in a folder where the dashboard-running user has viewer  permission. This prevents dashboard components from failing to refresh with the message “Error: The source report isn't available; it's been deleted or isn't in a folder accessible to the dashboard's running user”. This also prevents users from drilling into the source report and accidentally saving or deleting.

Note: Previously, when the "Sharing Model" Organization permission was disabled, all the reports saved in any public folder were moved to the "Unfiled Public Reports" folder.  This meant that turning this permission OFF was a one-step switch that gave all users the ability to view every single report within their organization (except for reports in other users' My Personal Reports folder). 

As of Winter '15, the disabling of this permission will no longer result in reports being moved into the "Unfiled Public Reports" folder.  An administrator, however, can make reports in public folders visible to all or any subset of users by granting the "View Reports in Public Folders" permission to any set of user profiles or permission sets (Analytics Enhanced Folder Sharing must be enabled for this profile permission to be available).