General Questions as Admin, Old Users?

You do not need to add the old users to an admin group, just change their password after they leave. We also change their full name field so you can see that they are not here. We put their first and last names as their first name and make their last name NLH (No Longer Here). This preserves the history of what they did. If that does not matter, then you can delete the user after you clean up their workspaces.

Deleting a user with a workspace will delete the workspace and remove the check-out of any items they were last working on. Unless you know what changes they were doing and IF those changes were ready for release, you will lose any work they did. This will also remove their name from the history of who did what to an object.

The only way to really see what was in someone else's workspace is to get IT to change their password and give it to you AND login on their old workstation. Barring that,I hope you have automatic upload when a file is saved enabled so at least all of their work is stored in their server side workspace and not their local workspace. If you have the auto upload enabled, then you can log into Windchill on any workstation as them and see what they have.

We have asked PTC to enable an admin function that will allow admins to look into other workspaces but it is not in the software yet.

In general, never delete a user.  The user account gets deleted from Windchill DS but not from the database (Oracle or SQL Server).

Better to simply make sure that the users who have left are removed from any Groups (Org level) from which they get access granted.  From Participant Admin, one by one edit the user account to belong to no groups.  May want to create a Group named "De-Activated Users" or something similar and add to that - for the purpose of just being able to have a list.  Assign no permissions to this Group.

You can implement a simple query builder report to find all the workspaces, with the person who created, last modified, etc.  We recently went thru a Windchill update and used it to force cleaning up all old workspaces - the report helps greatly.

It's hard coded that admin has access to see / delete other user's workspaces but can't see inside them.  An additional query builder report can easily be implemented to list the contents of individual workspaces - we have that in place.

There should be a simple admin procedure for handling things when a user leaves.

For reference see this previous discussion:  How best to mark users inactive or disabled?

What I am currently doing:

Steps to disable a User Account:

1. Change user password from orgadmin account.
2. Log in as user.
   1. Reassign any open tasks.
   2. Deal with any checked out work.
   3. Remove all workspaces
   4. Set calendar to delegate indefinitely to another user.
   5. Delete any subscriptions created by the user.
   6. Unsubscribe from other subscriptions
3. As orgadmin:
   1. Remove user from all groups.
   2. Add user to disabled group. (ZZZ_Disabled)
   3. Rename user by adding a zz prefix and a (Disabled) suffix
      1. For example: zz Marc DeBower (Disabled)
4. As disabled user:
   1. check for project, product, or library memberships
      1. Project: Make sure view shows ALL projects not just active ones.
5. As orgadmin:
   1. run report: tmc-Context Membership
   2. remove user from contexts found in preceding step.
   3. repeat these two steps as necessary until all team memberships have been removed.