Salesforce's New Report Folder Sharing

If you haven't enabled Salesforce's new Report Folder Sharing feature (Setup | Reports & Dashboards | Folder Sharing), here are some things to consider before doing so.

The biggest advantage is having more granular control of report sharing permissions.  For example, you can delegate users as managers of a folder without having to give them "Manage public reports" permission on their profile.  And then the rest can be viewers.

In the past, you set the folder to "Read Only" or "Read and Write", and that dictates what every user can do on that folder.  Only users with the "Manage public reports" permission can write to folders that were generally Read Only.  Even if a user's access was "Read and Write", without the "Manage public reports" permission, they cannot overwrite their old reports.  They had to save a new version and ask an admin or someone with that permission to delete the old reports.

Once the new Folder Sharing is enabled, the interface for setting permissions changes.  Before, you click "Edit" on the folder and at the bottom, pick groups, roles, or just all users (include or exclude portal users).

With the new folder sharing, there's a "Share" menu option when clicking on the folder, and a popup allows you to pick users, groups, roles, roles and subordinates, and then select a permission: Manager, Editor, Viewer.  (Details on each permission can be found here.)

Now on to the biggest disadvantage: In the past, if you had a folder that was shared to "All Users", i.e. the first two radio buttons above, when you schedule a report to be emailed, you can pick specific users from the list without doing anything else.

But with the new feature enabled, there is an extra step, even if the folder is shared to All Internal Users or All Users.  First you have to share the folder to those specific users.  Or create a public group with all of the users who need to receive the emailed report, then share the folder with that public group.

Only then will you be able to select those users or that public group as recipients of the report.

Note that previously scheduled reports will not be affected.  But for new scheduled reports, the step above is necessary.  I received so many calls about it, I even raised a ticket with Salesforce Support, and they said it is a "feature", not a bug.

Thanks for reading!