Foldr’s Secure Links feature gives external recipients an authenticated way into individual shared items via per-share URLs sent by email. Folio is a licensed add-on that goes a step further: it gives those external users a real sign-in to the root URL of your Foldr server, plus a small set of extra capabilities that are tied to the same licence.
If you’ve already set up Secure Links and want external users to be able to land at https://foldr.example.com and sign in with their email and password (rather than always opening a per-link URL from email), Folio is the missing piece.
Without Folio vs with Folio
Without a Folio licence, external user accounts created via Secure Links can sign in only to the per-share URLs they’ve been emailed. If an external user tries to hit https://foldr.example.com directly with their external credentials, they’ll get a permission-denied response.
With Folio, the same external accounts can sign in to the main Foldr URL and see a tailored interface scoped to what’s been shared with them.
What Folio adds
External user sign-in at the root URL
External users can sign in to the main Foldr web app’s sign-in page using the email address and password they set up via the Secure Link flow. After sign-in they see a Shared with Me view listing every public or secure link they’ve been added to as an external recipient.
The features Folio adds for external users (all part of the Folio licence):
- A sign-in page on the main Foldr URL.
- Search across all of their shared items.
- Co-editing, so a named recipient can work in a document alongside your own staff (see below).
- The ability to interact with custom fields the link creator exposed (see below).
- A file picker, for embedding-style flows where another app needs the external user to choose a file.
Working in the document together
The one that changes how people actually work. With Folio licensed, whoever creates a secure link can switch Editing on for it, and the named recipients of that link can then open the document and type in it, at the same time as the colleagues who reach it through the share.
It really is one document rather than two copies being reconciled afterwards. Everyone’s cursor shows up in everyone else’s window, the changes land as they’re typed, and the file saves back to the share it was always in. Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations, using the in-house Bureau editors.
It’s co-editing or nothing, which is deliberate: an external recipient never gets the file to themselves, so there’s no way for their save to quietly land on top of the work somebody else was doing. If a live session can’t be established, the document opens read-only and says why.
Two things follow from “named recipients”:
- An anonymous public link can never carry editing, whatever else is switched on, because an edit has to be attributable to a person.
- Take the last external recipient off a link and editing goes with them.
Turning Editing off takes effect straight away rather than whenever some token happens to expire, which matters on the afternoon somebody decides the draft has gone far enough.
Co-editing also depends on the two ordinary Bureau switches, the one on the format and the one on the share, so it’s worth reading Co-editing documents in Foldr Bureau alongside this. The link switch is an extra condition, not a way round them.
Per-link custom fields
When Folio is licensed, the user creating a public or secure link can attach custom field instances to the link itself. The external recipient sees those fields when they open the link, and can populate or update them depending on the field permissions. This turns a one-way file delivery into a structured back-and-forth. Useful for things like “review and tag this document”, “fill in this checklist”, or “annotate before approval”.
Without Folio, custom fields on shared links aren’t created (the field-attach code path is silently skipped).
Inbox email signature removal
When an Inbox share receives email and Folio is licensed, the link creator can opt in to signature removal. Foldr strips trailing email signatures from the message body before saving it as part of the file. Useful when the message body is being processed automatically (with Captur or a mashlet) and signature boilerplate would only get in the way.
Without Folio, the signature-removal toggle has no effect (the body is saved as-is).
Licence and tier
Folio is a licensed feature:
- Foldr SaaS: included in Business and Enterprise tiers.
- Foldr appliance: licensed add-on; contact sales / support to enable on an existing appliance.
When the licence is present and active, the external-user portal becomes available, the per-link field option appears in the share dialog, and the Inbox signature-removal toggle becomes available.
Configuring Folio
There’s no admin configuration for Folio itself beyond having the licence active. Once it’s in place:
- External users go through the same Secure Links flow as before. Link creators share with an email, the recipient gets the email, sets a password on first access, and can then use that password against either the per-share URL or the root URL.
- Existing external users created before Folio was licensed can sign in at the root URL straight away with their existing credentials.
For the underlying Secure Links setup (server email config, per-share permission grants, External Users in the share dialog), see Configuring and enabling Secure Links for users.
What external users see
After signing in at the root URL with Folio active:
- Shared with Me. Every link they’ve been added to. Folder shares are browsable, file shares open straight into the viewer, and they can download, or pin a few files into the tray to take away as one archive.
- Search. Full-text search scoped to their accessible content (not everything in Foldr).
- Their fields. For each link the creator attached fields to, the external user can read or update those fields per the field’s permission setup.
- The documents you’ve let them edit. If the link has Editing on, the editor is there whether they arrived from the emailed link or signed in and found the file under Shared with Me. Same document either way.
And what they can’t do
Worth being explicit, because “they can edit the file” and “they can change what’s in the folder” sound similar and aren’t:
- No creating, deleting, renaming or moving anything. Editing a document you’ve been let into is not write access to the folder it sits in, and the server refuses all of it regardless of what any browser is showing.
- No sharing anything onward. External users can’t create links of their own.
- No sight of anything they haven’t been explicitly shared with. Folio’s view is only what they’ve been given access to.
If you do want a recipient to be able to add files, that’s Uploads on the link, which is a separate switch and a separate decision.