Sharing & access

This is the most important page in the Geniviv docs. Getting access right is what turns a shared drive into a trustworthy one — the right people in, the wrong people out, with no guesswork.

Two layers: visibility, then grants

Access in Geniviv is built from two simple ideas stacked together.

1. Visibility — the baseline

Every file has a visibility:

• Organization (default) — everyone in your organization can see and open it.
• Private — only people you specifically grant access to can see it. To everyone else, it simply doesn’t appear.

Visibility is the floor: it sets who can reach a file before you share it with anyone in particular.

2. Grants — access for specific people

On top of visibility, you can grant an individual person a specific level of access to a file. A grant is precise: it’s one person, one file, one level.

The creator is always the owner

The person who creates a file is automatically its owner — no grant needed. Owners and organization Admins can always reach and manage a file.

The three access levels

A grant gives someone one of three levels. Each includes everything the level below it can do.

What you can do	Viewer	Editor	Owner
Open & download the file	✓	✓	✓
See the activity history	✓	✓	✓
Upload a new version	–	✓	✓
Rename, move & organize	–	✓	✓
Lock the file	–	✓	✓
Manage who has access	–	–	✓
Delete the file	–	–	✓

• Viewer — can open and download the file and see its history. The right choice for someone who needs to hear the work but not change it.
• Editor — everything a Viewer can do, plus upload new versions, organize, and lock. The right choice for active collaborators.
• Owner — everything an Editor can do, plus manage who else has access and delete the file. Reserve this for the people responsible for the file.

Sharing a file

1. Open the file and choose Share.
2. Pick the teammate you want to give access to.
3. Choose their level — Viewer, Editor, or Owner.
4. Confirm. They get a notification right away that they’ve been given access.

Only a file’s owner (or an organization Admin) can manage its access. This keeps control in the right hands — a Viewer can’t quietly hand the file to someone else.

A couple of guardrails

To prevent mistakes, Geniviv won’t let you change your own access on a file you’re managing, or strip the original owner’s access. Access can grow and shift, but it can’t accidentally lock everyone out.

What people can and can’t see

Geniviv quietly enforces all of this everywhere:

• A private file you haven’t been granted shows up nowhere in your lists — not in folders, not in search.
• A locked file you can’t edit stays out of your way too.
• Open a file you’re not allowed to see and Geniviv tells you why — “private,” “locked,” or “no access” — rather than a confusing dead end.

Putting it together

A typical pattern for a sensitive release:

1. Make the master private so it’s not organization-wide.
2. Grant the lead engineer Owner access.
3. Grant collaborators Editor access.
4. Grant the label manager Viewer access to follow along.

Everyone gets exactly what they need — nothing more. For patterns at scale, see Access-control patterns.