Feature Request: Federated groups + native federation support for Group Folders (Team Folders) #4232
Description
Summary
Group Folders (Team Folders) are widely used to manage structured, permission-based data for teams and departments.
Currently, Federated Cloud Sharing in Nextcloud only supports standard folders and user-level shares. This limits cross-instance collaboration when data is managed at the team level.
I propose two related improvements: one incremental and one long-term.
Option 1 — Incremental (recommended first step)
Allow adding federated users or federated groups directly to a Group Folder, for example:
hr@https://othernextcloudserver.com
Administrators should then be able to assign Advanced Permissions to these federated principals:
- read
- write
- create
- delete
- share
Expected behavior
- When access is granted, the remote Nextcloud instance receives the content under its standard “Shared” section.
- Permission logic remains controlled by the owning Group Folder, including inheritance and advanced permissions.
- No need for intermediary users or manual per-subfolder federation.
Option 2 — Native Federated Group Folder (long-term)
Introduce native federation support at the Group Folder level.
Concept:
- A Group Folder can be federated as a whole.
- The Group Folder itself becomes a first-class federated resource.
- Ownership, advanced permission inheritance, and centralized administration are preserved.
This could be exposed as a “Federated Group Folder” capability.
Why this matters
Current workarounds (federating subfolders, using intermediary users, or WebDAV-based external storage):
- Break permission inheritance
- Complicate auditing and ownership
- Increase administrative overhead
- Are unintuitive for administrators and end users
Use cases
- Cross-company project collaboration
- Holding companies with multiple Nextcloud instances
- Managed service providers serving separate customer instances
- Enterprise environments