I thought I’d post this little question as I’ve been turning it over in my mind for a little while and was wondering what other people do.
I have a large number of user accounts which have been disabled over a long period of time. The extra security groups they were originally added to have been removed and I’m now wondering what, if any, reason is there to keep them on the system.
Do other people and organisations generally delete the user accounts or do they leave them as effectively empty shells.
If I delete them do their personal folders (and any reports they have in them) get deleted or do they become orphans?
Does this affect audit records at all?
Would be interested if anyone has any thoughts on this.
We hesitate to delete since our users move around to different departments and may lose rights to BI for a short time. Also we have had users quit/retire only to come back a few years later.
At some point, you have to clean house… We used to have people leave and come back, but they almost always came back as a different role.
Now, I would not be averse to giving old reports over to a new user taking over responsibilities from a user that’s leaving, at least there you assume the reports are applicable.
If you have your security set up properly, then you will only worry about losing the personal folder of the person going.
I’d disable for 3/6 months and then delete - gives enough time to see if there were dependencies or if someone needs a report from their personal folder that should have been in a main folder.
Just a quick line to say thanks to those of you who posted on this topic. We are going to take this to our senior management to give a final go ahead, but we are thinking that we will disable accounts for six months (if we have received notification that the user has left) and then delete the account after that if they haven’t returned.
(BOB member since 2003-06-04)
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)