Collaborators are users who have access to view, edit, or manage access to a document or folder. Each collaborator has a Collaborator Role (see table below) which determines what actions they can execute on the document or folder they have access to.
Collaborator grants can be given to both users and groups of users. Group membership is managed by admins through the UI or the Group APIs. When a group is made a collaborator of a document or folder, all users who are actively in that group will have that level of access to the document. Users being added to or removed from a group will result in those users' access to documents or folders being updated in real time. Any users who have access to a document or folder directly and through a group will see their effective access as the greater of the two collaborator grants.
Collaboration access is inherited through folders. If a user is a collaborator on a document directly, that direct access will always take priority. Otherwise, the user's effective access level will be the greatest access from all folders the document is a descendant of in the folder tree, recursively.
It is possible for shortcuts to a document to live in other folders. These shortcut document entries do not grant any collaborator access, no matter what access a user has to the folder containing it.
Collaborator Roles
Roles determine what actions a collaborator can execute on a document or folder. Collaborators with a role on a document only have the specified level of access to just that one document, but collaborators on a folder have that level of access to all of the folder's contents, recursively.
| Role | Description |
|---|---|
| owner | The owner of the document or folder, with all permissions. Cannot be changed by Collaborator APIs |
| editandshare | View, comment on, edit, and control which users can access the document or folder |
| edit | View, comment on, and edit the document or folder |
| comment | View the document or folder. Leave comments on the document |
| view | View the document or folder. View basic information about the contents of a folder |