Deactivating users vs deleting users


Userlevel 6
Badge +4

So the question is...delete or deactivate users. Here’s what I am thinking:

  • We delete a user if the user has never logged in or has logged in but has no activity, i.e. no courses started/completed, no posts or any other engagement - this feels like dead weight in the system and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to maintain the record. 
  • We deactivate a user who has activity - the thinking being to maintain historical data and user information tied to the activity. In this case, when you are running reports that show previous periods of activity, I’m guessing you include deactivated users but for current user counts, you exclude deactivated users. 

Interested in hearing what others are doing. 

 

 


12 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Love your mindset here. I think it’s important to have regular audits of the system to keep it as clean as possible. We’ve tried to do quarterly audits over the past 2 years with each quarter having specific areas to focus on. My  question for you is how often would you delete users or what is your timeframe in which a user can have no activity before you’ll delete the user?

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

@steveninfinger Yes, good idea to add scheduled timeframe to process/perform user audits. I agree that this would help keep things clean. We are usually “forced” to do the clean up each school season when we bring on a new group of part time employees. And we have a lot of turnover in this position so some of it just happens in an ongoing way. For our partner users, it’s a bit trickier to perform a regular audit because we don’t know if a partner employee has left the organization or is just not engaging now but may do so in the future. We have a designated Power User at each partner organization and have “trained” them on how to keep user information up-to-date but let’s be real...they basically don’t do it. Sometimes they send us a list of new people to add along with people who have left. At the very least I can coordinate an “audit” with each partner at least once a year to get things cleaned up and it will also be a good time to review important updates and tasks regarding the system that are relevant to my Power User. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +2

I would like to add two points from my side as to why I think deactivating is often better than deleting (especially when users are active):

  • Deactivating users instead of deleting them is extra important if you have Coach & Share. Otherwise, all content they’ve uploaded - even to public channels - will be deleted with the user and no one will be able to use it  or see it anymore (at least that was the case a few months ago...)
  • Additionally, if you have Gamification and you give your user rewards, when you delete a user, you will no longer be able to find what reward they asked for or what was given to them

Of course, it may also mess up your reports and statistics a bit when you delete your users :slight_smile:

Userlevel 3
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I think deactivating is best. We have had multiple instances of re-hiring prior employees, especially due to Covid-19. We were able to reactivate them versus creating them as a brand new user and also knew what they completed in their prior onboarding and training so we didn’t need to reassign everything.

Userlevel 2

We avoid deleting the users in most cases. We keep their account active so that if they want to enrol again for the course then they can use same account. Also, it doesn’t slow down the server or affect database (if we have inactive users). We only delete the users if a client has closed the business relations and want to wipe out the data from the system.

Userlevel 2

Cindy you specifically said deletion is only for users that have no engagement with the system so the only thing I would wonder about is were they enrolled in courses but did not participate?  If so this is information that can be used to look at overall engagement for courses/learning plans. 

Not sure what the advantage of deleting is over deactivating other than the satisfaction of doing so (not to be discounted). For me if I don’t have a compelling reason to delete I’d just deactivate.

Userlevel 4
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There could be a regulatory aspect to whether you want to delete or deactivate users. 

If you deactivate a user, you still have access to their learning history, which is required in some cases. 

And if you delete a user, you’re no longer storing their personal data, which could be an issue with privacy regulations such as GDPR. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Once you have gone live fully across your organization? Delete = Bad…especially for auditing.

@Anders is spot on.

Userlevel 7
Badge +1

We pretty much only deactivate users, as we want to keep our statistics and reports consistent, also we have seen many cases where people changed jobs or returned to a previous employer and wanted their learning history and certifications reinstated.

We were only deleting user accounts a few times - on a direct request to be completely removed.

By the way, Docebo, recently introduced a new option - “Anonymize Deleted Users” - it may be enabled on the Users tab in Advanced Settings, and could be a better option for GDPR compliance (didn’t try it yet). I’d however, prefer to have this setting available as an option when deleting individual accounts, instead of being platform-wide.

Is there a way to bulk delete users who have never accessed Docebo? We made the mistake years ago of batch-importing from another database and now we have about 16,000 users who have *never* used it.

Userlevel 7
Badge +1

Hi @kyetter I don’t think you can use the standard filters, as you can’t set them to only list accounts with an empty last access date.

I can think about an API script to review all users in your database and delete those who never logged in and were created over a few years ago, but even without using the API, you can

  • Add an additional Yes/No field to your users’ database - e.g. “To be deleted”
  • Use a report to export to Excel/CSV all your users created before a certain date (over a few years ago)
  • Use filters in Excel to only list those users who have the Last Access date empty
  • Create a CSV file with only two columns - username, and To be deleted, and paste there all those usernames which needs to be deleted, and for all of them set the value in the second column to Yes
  • Using the CSV import in the User manager, import that CSV (make sure to enable updating existing users), effectively marking all those dormant accounts for deletion
  • Then you will be able to use a standard filter on the Users screen to list only those accounts that have the To be deleted filed set to Yes,
  • Double (or triple) check if those are indeed the accounts you want to delete
  • Use Select All, and delete them.

I’d suggest first testing this on a sandbox (if you have one), or on a small group of users.

Userlevel 4
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I want to second what @Anders raised. Consider your company’s adherance to GDPR or whatever relevant data protection laws apply for your employees. You may be required to delete them.

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