User Management Help Needed

[Wes Farnsworth]

We are a small organization and are currently using the free version of Confluence because we don't have many users who need access. Recently, we've had some changes in personnel, and I've removed members who are no longer with us. When I did that, Confluence "suspended" their accounts, but it didn't completely remove them. Once I added the new users who replaced them, it took us over the allotted 10 free accounts. Because it appears that they are counting both active and suspended accounts. 

Is there a way to completely delete the suspended accounts so that this isn't the case? I've got complete ADMIN control, and have tried everything I can think of, but haven't been able to figure it out.

Can anyone help?

[Wes Farnsworth · Accepted solution]

For clarification....

I've gone to ADMIN > Directory > Users and then clicked the three dots next to their name to which I can "show details", "add user to a group" or "suspend access". If I go into their profile by clicking their name or "show details" I can change their roles, login as them, view product details, or remove product access, but it doesn't give me the option to remove/delete the user all together. 

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

@Wes Farnsworth this sounds like "new user management experience" and specifically for the "site user" rather than the "managed user".

1) As I said, ultimately you want to un-license users, so they don't count towards your 10 users in Confluence. If you remove their product access to Confluence – you will achieve what you are after. Does this work for you? Mind you it will take some time (5 min?) to reflect in licensed users counts.

2) Also, when you go into the user's record (i.e. "show details") on the top right there is yet another 3-dots aka "meatballs" menu – do you see it?

There should be option there to "remove user" – this is "remove user from this site". This will keep their Atlassian Cloud account active or suspended but should remove them from licensed users.

3) Still, since these users have actually left organisation... it would be best NOT to leave an unattended identity in Atlassian Cloud that uses your organisation's domain.

Under ADMIN > Directory  do you have Managed accounts on the left? Do the users you are trying to get rid of appear there?

If yes, i.e. you've verified your domain, and you've claimed your users, so you, as an org admin, are in full control – you should get Deactivate button in the top right of each user record, and Delete under meatballs menu (but again, don't use this for real users, even if they are now ex-employees, do Deactivate instead)

[Wes Farnsworth]

I was finally able to get it to work. I ended up having to suspend the account, then remove product access, then it finally allowed me to remove the user account altogether. 

Thanks for everyone's help! 

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

@Wes Farnsworth can you accept my answer below, since the comment that seem to have helped you was a reply to your own answer :)

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

Hello, @Wes Farnsworth 

So ultimately you want to remove groups from the users that give them a license to Confluence.

This is not an action at the level of Confluence, same as it wasn't Confluence that suspended the users – this is at the level of the site and if you are on the new user management experience (most likely), this is at the level of the whole Atlassian Cloud done in admin.atlassian.com

Deactivating (not suspending, and not removing from site) a managed user under your control  (i.e. from an email domain that you've verified, and a user you've claimed) would have done it automatically.

I don't think that's what you've done – can you clarify what exactly did you do when you say "I removed members" and "making a user inactive".

Actually deleting the users should not be necessary – "delete" in Atlassian Cloud is like a "privacy request to forget me completely", this will cause every reference to the former user to be shown as Former User i.e. anonymised, a "null" reference. Ideally you would want to avoid this for traceability (e.g., to still be able to see who made a comment or who made this crucial edit on a page a year ago)

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Wes Farnsworth 

I don't have a free cloud available 

If you go to user administration on the org level, do you see smth like this? For me, this removes the user and and the user count drops.

[Danno]

@Wes Farnsworth Welcome to the Atlassian way of life. My first suggestion is to not remove users who are no longer there right away. You should just make them inactive. You'll find it is easier to serach for stuff w/o having to resort to looking up there id #s.

Now to the licensing issue. You can have an unlimited number of Guests but each guest is limited to one space. If you choose this route, you can decide to give them access to a community space related to a project or give them a personal space. If that is the choice then you would have to rely on your 10 "super-users" to collect items from their personal spaces to get excerpts or include pages in the common documents. I hope that makes sense and helps you out.

[Wes Farnsworth]

Unfortunately, that doesn't help. Making a user inactive is what moved them to "suspended" status instead of removing them from the roster, which is what I want to do. In the past, when I did that, it removed them; now it's not.

I can't invite guests to use the space without upgrading our current plan, which is not what we want to do at the moment. That's why I'm trying to figure out how to remove someone altogether.  

[Danno]

@Wes Farnsworth I have a free account and the confluence-guests-stratodanno group is available to me. I've added a coworker in as a guest user just in Confluence. I will experiment a bit with it to see if I can replicate your issue.

[Danno]

@Wes Farnsworth I'm wondering about your "complete ADMIN control" permission. Please see this article to help you determine what Admin type you are. I'm beginning to think you only have admin rights for Confluence and not your cloud site.

Give users admin permissions