Folio: the external user portal

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 capabilities Folio adds for external users (all gated behind the Folio licence):

• A sign-in page on the main Foldr URL.
• Search across all of their shared items.
• 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.

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 feature flag gated by the folio capability:

• 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 routes are reachable, 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 preview directly.
• Search. Full-text search scoped to their accessible content (not the whole tenant).
• 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.

External users still can’t browse to anything they haven’t been explicitly shared with. Folio’s view is only what they’ve been given access to.