A staff member retires, leaves for a better opportunity or gets fired. As the administrator of Google Apps for your organization you are faced with the question of what to do the users account? Do you simple suspend the account or do you delete the account? This blog entry will detail the various options you have for handling an employee leaving.

Obviously the first thing you want to do is to disable the user from accessing his/her Google account. This can be done by clicking on the user from the Users and Groups section of the admin dashboard and then clicking Suspend User:

 

At NimbleUser we do not recommend the suspend feature as email to the account will get bounced. We still want to receive the email but we just wanted it routed to someone else.

At NimbleUser we use one of the following options:

1. Option A - Disable & Forward
This option is a good option for users of the Standard , Educational  and Non-Profit  versions (I.e. the user is not pay for additional accounts) or organizations who do not need to recycle (I.e. free up an account license and allocate to another user) the user.

a.    Immediately change the password so the user cannot log in anymore.

b.    Log into Google apps as that user go into Settings / Forwarding and POP/IMAP and in the forwarding section we select Forward a copy of incoming mail to and enter   the email address of a person that will be responding to emails sent to the employee who is no longer at the organization:

 

c.    At this point nothing more needs to be done. At some point the account can be transfered and deleted (see Option B).

2.     Option B - Transfer Ownership and Delete
This option is best used when the organization wants to free up the account and use it for another user (perhaps a new employee). This option saves the organization from having to purchase another licence.

a.    Immediately change the password so the user cannot log in anymore.

b.    Log in to user Google Apps account

c.    Go into email and forward any important emails to whoever may need to reference them in the future

d.    Transfer ownership of documents.

Go into docs and find all of the documents owned by that individual:

Select all of the documents (be sure to wait until all of the docs load - this may take a little while):

 

Click More Actions and change owner (note that at the time of this blog entry there are certain restrictions: e.g. you cannot change owner of an uploaded file):

 


Choose the new owner (typically the Google Admin, the user's supervisor or the user's replacement):

 


Another option is to simply export all of the files by selecting Export:

 


Which will convert all of the documents in to the corresponding desktop file and downlad them as 1 large zip file:

 

e.    Transfer Ownership of Sites

Next go to Sites. This will show a list of all of the sites the user has access to. Unfortunately there is no way at present to limit this list to only sites that the user is owner of; it will show all sites where the user is the owner, collaborator or viewer. If the users is deleted, any site that they are owner of will also be deleted so we need to go into each site in this list and see it the user is an an owner and if so make another user (again typically the Google Admin, the user's supervisor or the user's replacement) the owner.

It should be noted that (unlike Google Docs) Google Sites can have more than one owner.

 


Note in the image above that if the site is not shared the site is definitely owned by the user.

To determine if the user is an owner of the site, open each of the sites and, once open, Click on More Actions and then Share this site. If you do not see Share this site then the user in not the owner.

 


** Note if the Share this site option does not appear in the drop-down menu, the user is not an owner of this site

If the user is listed as an owner (as it is in the example below):

 

Designate another user to be the owner:

 

Determine what you want to happen if someone emails that individual. It is likely that you will not want the emails to bounce. That being the case, create an new group:

 


for the removed user that forwards to a user that is going to be handling the email for the removed user:

 

 

 

f..    Export / Import user's calendars

If the user has calendars that need to referencable going forward they will have to be exported and imported (at this time there is no way to transfer ownership).

Export the calendars from within calendar settings; this will export all of the users calendars in ICS format to a zip file

 


Make note of the sharing settings for each calendar:

 

 


The user that is going to be manageing these calendars needs to create a new calendar with the same name (in their own Google Account). Make sure to apply the same sharing settings:

 


Once the calendar has been completed, import the ICS file into this calendar

 

 Google will give a summary once the calendar has been imported

 


g.    Lastly, Delete the user.

From users and groups, delete the user: