Over the years, many Users have been added to our Worldserver envronment. What is the best practice to follow for User management? 1. Users that no longer work in our projects OR have left the organization - should i delete the users or disable them? How does one help over the other? 2. If i delete a user, does it delete all references to the projects that the user worked on in the past? 3. We have User, User Type, Workflow Role, Workgroup. What is the hierarchy to be followed when removing a user from WorldServer? |
1 and 2: If you are completely sure that a User will no longer work in WorldServer, you can attempt to delete it. However, depending on whether the User is still in use, the deletion might or might not work (leading to the User being disabled instead of completely deleted/removed from Worldserver). Let's consider we have the following scenario as an example: User A - assigned to a project User B - not referenced or used anywhere If you try to delete User A, this will not be deleted, because it is referenced in the task step assignment. Instead, it will be disabled. When you will try to delete a user, this information will also be displayed: If a user is referenced by workflows, tasks, issues, or any other object in WorldServer, then the user will be disabled instead of deleted. A disabled user will no longer be able to log in and will not appear in user lists If you try to delete User B (not referenced or used anywhere ), there will be no warning and it will be indeed completely removed. Reasons for considering disabling a user (rather than deleting): 1- The object(s) the user is assigned to will not be impacted 2- After disabling it, everything is still usable. For example in the above scenario, when user A is deleted, the task will still appear to be assigned to user A (it will be displayed greyed out). User A is not able to log in anymore, but an Administrator can reassign the user to an active one and you can carry on with the ongoing projects without issues 3- Based on future developments, an Administrator can re-enable the user, and nothing existing or new will be impacted Also: a User can be automatically disabled by the system if the authentication type is set to Enhanced and the user enters the wrong password multiple times when trying to log in. There isn't a notable difference between a deleted user and a disabled user. It is mainly a mechanism to prevent all objects be referenced correctly and avoid NULL java errors. And, of course, the accepted mechanism for temporarily blocking users for wrong passwords. 3. User Type, Workflow Role, and Workgroup are not dependent on User. Once the user is deleted, it will be automatically removed from these objects. As presented in the message dialog above, Workflows, Tasks, Issues, or any other object in WorldServer will prevent the user to be deleted if the user is assigned to any of these objects. Instead, the User will be disabled. Any other object could be a custom attribute or any other type of customization. |