Our organization has an automated workflow that downgrades user types after a defined period of inactivity. This recently led to an issue where users could not be deleted post-downgrade.
While troubleshooting, we followed the guidance outlined in https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/error-unable-to-delete-member-username-member-must-not..., but no scheduled admin reports were found under the user’s account.
Further investigation revealed that the user had an active scheduled geoprocessing task, identifiable via the Sharing API endpoint (sharing/rest/portals/self/allScheduledTasks). Attempts to reassign, disable, or delete the task resulted in permission errors, even when performed by an administrator.
With assistance from Esri Support, we identified the root cause: scheduled tasks cannot be deleted once the user type has been downgraded from Creator/Publisher.
Suggested Improvements:
- Enhance documentation to clearly call out this limitation.
- Provide proactive validation or warnings during user type downgrade if scheduled tasks exist.
- Improve error messaging to explicitly indicate that user type downgrade is blocking task deletion.
- Enable admins to manage or remove scheduled tasks regardless of the user’s downgraded type as admin getting permission errors doesn't make sense.
This would help prevent operational blockers and reduce troubleshooting effort for administrators.
