Product Tip Tuesday: Transfer a Departing Employee’s Dropbox Files to Their Manager

When someone leaves a company for any reason—a layoff, resignation, or termination—tensions can run high. If access to company data is not revoked quickly, business-critical files could be deleted, damaged, or stolen by an upset employee. 

Files “owned” by the person leaving can also be critical sources of data for ongoing work being done by other employees. To ensure that work can continue uninterrupted, your offboarding process should include transferring ownership of the departing employee’s files to their manager. 

Completing these steps manually in Dropbox is a slow and error-prone process. First, you look up the departing employee’s email address, find out who their manager is, and then look up their manager’s email address. Then, you use that information inside of Dropbox to transfer ownership of the files. When the transfer is complete, you then have to remove the departing employee’s account. If you want anyone to know about the change, you have to notify them directly via Slack or email. Click, after click, after click, after click.

To save time and remove all those clicks, you can automate this entire process with BetterCloud’s Dropbox and identity access management (Google, Okta, and OneLogin) integrations.

In this sample workflow, when a departing employee’s Okta account is deactivated, BetterCloud finds the employee’s manager’s email address in Google Workspace. Next, the departing team member is removed from Dropbox. Inside of this action, one activated toggle switch removes the employee’s access to the Dropbox files downloaded to their connected devices. A second toggle transfers file ownership to the manager, and a dropdown box selection notifies a current IT team member about the changes. With one click, this entire process happens automatically.

By incorporating a similar process inside of their offboarding workflow, BetterCloud customer Blue Apron reduced their offboarding time from four hours to 10 minutes.

Check out our technical knowledge base to learn more about workflows, including pre-built workflow templates you can customize. You can also watch a webinar to learn how to use BetterCloud to set up workflow templates for offboarding.