A folder in Salesforce is used to store reports, dashboards, documents, or e-mail templates. Folders can be public, hidden, or shared, and they can be set to read-only or read/write access. You can control the access to folder contents based on roles, permissions, public groups, and license types.

You can make a folder available to your entire organization or make it private so that only the owner has access to it. If your organization has no folder sharing enabled, then the sharing options are not so granular, and the following screenshot confirms the options that are available. It also shows the Folder Sharing setting to control folder visibility for reports and dashboards. The navigation path for the folder is Setup | Customize | Reports & Dashboards | Folder Sharing.

The following screenshot shows the folder visibility settings that the administrator can configure:

If folder sharing is enabled, then the sharing options of a folder can be more granular. As shown in the...