Disable, Review, Delete: A best practice for managing the accounts of departing users

[Kylie]

Goodbye is never easy. You’ve had a great time mapping together, but now a user is moving on. A graduating student, a retiring teacher, or the departure of any user from your school or district requires you to remove their ArcGIS Online access to keep your ArcGIS organization secure. You know that you need to review their items and delete their account, but you don’t have the time or the right people to review it now. That doesn’t mean you can’t protect your organization! Disable their account now and continue with reviewing and deleting it once your time allows.

Admins often overlook disabling an account, which removes the user’s access and gives the admin time to do a review of the items and groups owned by the account.

What you’ll do:

1. Disable their account
2. Review their items and groups
3. Delete their account

How you’ll do it:

1. Disable the account

Once a user has left your school or district, disable their account to remove their access to it. You can disable a single account or multiple accounts.  

1. In ArcGIS Online, click Organization in the top bar.
2. Click Members in the blue bar.
3. Select the account or accounts to disable (up to 100).
4. Click More above the table.
5. Click Disable member accounts.

Limitations of disabled accounts

A disabled account still exists in ArcGIS Online, and its items are unaffected. Shared items are still available to others. However, the user can no longer use the disabled account to sign in, work with their content, administer the site, or otherwise consume organizational resources.

Note: The content in a disabled account still consumes credits. The account is still a member and counts toward the number of users in your organization.

2. Review their items and groups

Disabling their account gives you time to review their items and groups, preserving those that need to live on, and deleting ones that are no longer needed. Some tips for your review:

Best practice: Before they leave, ask users to clean up their own items and groups. Not all will, but the ones that know what needs to be preserved, saving you review time.

• Use a showcase account to preserve items that are still needed
• How the item is shared is a clue – if only available to the owner, no one else is relying on it.
• Key words in titles like “test” “draft” “OLD” and “delete” help you identify items that can be cleaned up.
• View counts and other metadata can help give an idea of the content in question.
• Groups that the user owned might be unnecessary and ready for deletion, or they might need to be assigned new owners. Reviewing the member list and content helps you determine if a group should be kept.
• Read A tidy ArcGIS Online organization for the holidays – identifying and deleting unnecessary items for additional tips on using the organization status and reports during your review.

Remember, it’s up to you:

• You can be aggressive and delete items you think unnecessary, then restore them for. (Before deleting, make sure you have your ArcGIS organization recycle bin enabled if you’ll want to restore!)
• You can only delete items you are sure can go and store the others for the time being. The preserved items will use credits but that might be acceptable in your organization.

3. Delete the account

Now that you have cleaned up the groups and items, you can delete the account. In ArcGIS Online, select the account or accounts to delete (up to 100), click More, and click Delete members.

Summary

By disabling accounts as people leave your school or district, you can keep your organization secure and also take your time to review their items and groups. Disable, review, then delete to keep your organization members current.

Looking for more best practices for organization management? See the ArcGIS for Schools Bundle Administration Guides.