Best way to manage user's groups for people who are not longer with the company

[Nari Man]

OK, here is the issue.

I need to bulk change tickets . These tickets are old ones with some of the reporter no longer with the company. In the past we would remove the users ffrom all the groups and uncheck the Active check box next to thier name. when a reporter of a ticket is inactive or does not belong to a group I am not able to move that ticket without assigning a new reporter. Assigning a new reporter changes the reporter for all the tickets in the bulk change. (not desired).

Is there a best practice on how to manage users who are no longer with the company so these tpye of issues do not happen in the future after they have left?

I hope I am not too unclear about the issue. Let me know and I appreciate your help.

NR

[Joshua Thompson]

I think you can get away with removing the user from all groups (which prevents any login) without actually setting them as inactive. This makes it so the user does not count against your license. If the user is active (but not in a group) you can happily re-assign the issue to another user without having to modify the reporter. There is no need to remove historically accurate information; you can leave the original reporter as is.

[Joshua Thompson]

Sorry I missed the point here - I was testing it with an individual issue edit rather than the bulk change feature. Regardless, I tested this on our test instance of Jira 6.0 and it worked without issue. I searched for a subset of issues assigned to a specific user, but reported by various users (some by that user, some by others). I then disabled and removed all rights from that user and bulk edited those issues to modify the assignee and it worked without a problem. I did not have to modify the reporter. What version of Jira are you using?

[Nari Man]

JIRA 5.1.7. Can you try moving the tickets to another project. In my case it says reporter is required and will not let me move to next step. .

[Joshua Thompson]

Hmmm yes - when I move the issues to another project it requires the reporter. That is annoying. I don't know how many users you have in your instance but a workaround could be if you migrate them in sets according to N reporter/assignee combinations and performing the bulk update N times.

[Nari Man]

This is why I wanted to see if others have a better user manager process to avoid issues like this in the future. I can keep all users active because we have unlimited license.