proper way to remove former employees without losing data

[J Neathawk]

We have some boards and cards that need to outlive the former employees who created them. What is the right way to delete the old users (read: stop paying for them) without losing any data they created?

[Miguel Ramon · Accepted solution]

-- 24.03.13 Edit --

Please see the replies for the full answer. This original answer only applies if you plan to deactivate a managed account from all Atlassian Cloud products.

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Hello @J Neathawk ! You'll need to remove Product Access for these users from the admin panel.

To get from the admin panel, go to admin.atlassian.com and select your organization. 

From there, go to "Directory", search for the user, and remove all user access:

As an additional step, go ahead and also select the meatballs (...) menu and select "Suspend User". 

After this, the user will not be taking up a license seat, but all historic data will be maintained in the instance. Note that if instead of selecting "Suspend" you select "Remove", all user data will be removed and anonymized as "Former User".

Let me know if you have further questions!

[J Neathawk]

Miguel,

Looks like I have set things up differently. All my users have been added directly from the "Members" section of Trello and they do not appear in admin.atlassian.com

In Trello members area I have been deactivating users... it seems to be doing the same job. Is this correct then? All their access is gone, the data remains, and the billing is for active members only. If so then I may be doing it right already.

[Miguel Ramon]

Hey @J Neathawk! Terribly sorry, I didn't notice when I typed my first answer that this was for Trello and not Jira. Indeed, the way you describe your approach is correct (My approach would only be applicable if you're administering "managed accounts" from the admin panel and needing to suspend access to all Atlassian Cloud products).

What you are doing from the members area inside Trello is correct. Once you select "Deactivate", it removes access (and the license seat) for that user but retains all their associations to cards, etc. If you instead select to remove the user, all associations will be removed.

You can reference this KB page for more info: https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/what-is-a-deactivated-user/

[J Neathawk]

thank you!

[J Neathawk]

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