Best practice for user account delete or leave on deactivate

[Aaron Geister]

So what is the best practice for a Jira Cloud instance. To leave users on the deactivate list or to clean out the users in user management and delete them from our instance? I am unsure how to go about this right now. Does anyone have a tips or hints on what they do so I can make a better decision of how to handle deactivated users. 

[Arian Hintringer · Accepted solution]

Hi, I would suggest to deactivate users and not delete them. Especially for us this works well as users tend to be inactive for a while and then come back after a few months or 1 or 2 years (project work with pauses in between where we work with users on the customer side). Then we simply activate their users again.

See more info here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/delete-or-disable-users-138318.html

One question we are still struggling with is how to manage the users properly without having to scan the user list manually or depend on the project managers' feedback. Apparently there is no way to filter users based on last activity. This is very tedious. So let me know if you have a found a way to deal with this.

[Aaron Geister]

At this time we use a external directory. We have not come up with a way to deal with users that have not had contact with the system for a prolong time. I wish one we didn't need to wait 14 days to delete a user and also that if a user had no baring on the system we should be able to delete them since they have not had contact to the system. We get lots and lots of new hires that don't make the cut and then they are left in the system for no reason. I am looking for a solution also. I will let you know when I find the best solution. I think if they allowed us to determine which users can be on a delete list and which users should be on deactivated list would be nice.

[Scott Theus]

Hi @Aaron Geister ,

The best practice is to deactivate the user, leaving them in the system but not taking up a license. This allows you to retain access to any shared filters and boards, or any other artifacts that might own or be assigned to. 

If you delete them you will lose the ability to modify any of the dashboards/filters they had set up.

-Scott

[Aaron Geister]

Thanks for the reply and advice. I appreciate it. We have outside LDAP connection which puts them in deactivated for us once they are removed from AD so it helps that its not a manual process.

Just wasn't sure if we should remove them totally. Most of our users are actually customers and just using the LDAP to bring in our customer base.  Would this be the same for customers too or should that be something we can remove? since they don't take a license and or make validated changes.