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title: Shared Categories (Folders)
collection: developer
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locale: en-us
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canonical_url: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/shared-categories.html
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  - Marketing Cloud
---
# Shared Categories (Folders)

You can share categories with one or more business units that have Content Builder Sharing enabled.

- Create shared categories under the root category called Shared Content. Categories under the Content Builder root category can’t be shared. Root categories in Content Builder are read-only.

- All shared categories live in and are owned by the enterprise business unit. Shared categories can be shared selectively to specific MIDs or globally, if your account has access to Content Builder Across Enterprise Sharing.

- Shared categories can hold up to 100 subcategories and 5,000 assets.

**note:** The Shared Content root category can hold 5,000 assets, but it is limited to 100 subcategories.

- When creating or moving assets into a shared category, share them with the same MIDs that the category is shared with.

## Shared Category Scenarios

Each of these examples describes a scenario where you can’t create or update a shared category because the `sharedWith` properties of the categories aren’t compatible.

### Scenario 1

If you create shared category **Indianapolis** under the Shared Category root category and only share it to business units A and B, you can’t create a category under **Indianapolis** that is shared globally.

### Scenario 2

If you create shared category **Indianapolis** under the Shared Category root category and only share it to business units A and B, you can’t create a category under **Indianapolis** that is shared to business unit C.

### Scenario 3

If shared category **Indy 500** is shared with business units A and B, and a shared category under **Indy 500** named **SubFolder** is shared with business unit B, you can’t remove business unit B from **Indy 500**’s `sharedWith` properties.

### Scenario 4

If shared category **Salesforce Tower** is shared with business units A and B, and you have several assets in the shared category shared in the same fashion, you can’t update the sharing settings of **Salesforce Tower** to share the category with only business unit C. The updated `sharedWith` property would conflict with the properties of the assets in that shared category.

## Differences Between SharingProperties on Assets and Categories

Here is the `sharingProperties` object from a sample shared category:

```js
{
  ...
  "sharingProperties: {
    "sharedWith" : [ 333, 555 ],
    "sharingType" : "edit"
  }
}
```

The `sharingProperties` object on assets and categories has the same structure but with different content. The only valid properties in the `sharingProperties` object for categories are `sharedWith` and `sharingType`. `SharedWith` is an array of business unit MIDs that you are sharing this category with. `SharingType` indicates the permission that you grant to the MIDs. The only possible value for categories is `edit`, meaning shared categories can always be viewed and edited. If a shared category’s `sharedWith` property is updated to add or remove MIDs, all assets in that shared category are asynchronously updated to have the same sharing properties, as long as the update to the categorys `sharedWith` property doesn’t fall into Scenario 4.

## Related Items

- [Asset Model](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/asset-model.md)
- [Sharing](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/sharing.md)