Allow specific access to folders while keeping "Inherit"

Jonathan Champ

I wrongly expected that Panopto access controls would behave the same way as Google Drive. When I give someone access to a folder in Drive, that user is granted access to all content within that folder and all of its descendants. As long as "Inherit" is set, this works the same way in Panopto.

Now let's consider a situation: Folder A -> Child Folder B -> Grandchild Folder C. Initially, all of these folders are set to "Inherit".

First, I set Folder A to "Specific People" and assign User #1 Creator access. And then I set Folder C to "Specific People", which automatically copies the inherited User #1 to Folder C. I then give User #2 Creator access on Folder C so they can both create content there. Then I want to give User #3 access to Folder A (and presumably, all of its descendants), but adding User #3 to Folder A will only grant access to Folder A and Folder B! I only wanted to grant one additional person access to Folder C, but now I have to make sure to tree-walk all of the descendants of Folder A looking for folders that do not inherit access and add User #3 directly to each one.

While annoying, it's somewhat impossible in the sense that I cannot programmatically determine if the folder is set to inherit at all (without performing a messy guess-and-check to try and add access there, then relying on a failure response that complains about inheritance being in effect).

Please allow us to add users and groups to Folders that are in the "Inherit permissions" state. Confusingly, Sessions already work this way in the "Specific People" mode, which doesn't make sense to me either, but at least I can make that work.