Best method to deal with users who are no longer with company

[Nariman Riahi]

What is the best method to deal with the user accounts that are no longer with the company?

I want to make sure that they do not count against my license and also do not want to delete the user.

Is removing them from every group taking care of this?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

Just removing them from 'JIRA Users' global permission will take them out of license count. But removing from all groups and maybe adding them to an inactive-users group is preferred as they don't turn up in project roles, other permissions etc.

[Nariman Riahi]

So remove them from all groups. Add them to a group that has no permission at all. Correct?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

yup.That's right.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

@Bob I don't think you need permission as long as the user is visible. Error comes only when user is deleted.

Only if you try to assign/edit it again, the current assignee will be removed since it doesn't have any permission. That normally makes sense since it is not a valid user anymore.

[Bob Swift]

If the are the assignee on any old issue, they need to retain that permission or you have trouble updating that issue. Alternative is to modify the issues and remove them - that can be a pain.

[Nariman Riahi]

BTW, does the same way work for Confluence? I know I can "disable" users in COnfluence. Should I then remove them from all groups, add them to "nopermission" group and then still click on Disable link?

[Saneth Kumar]

Yes, just remove them from teh jira-users group. That would disable their usernames

[Beth Schaefermann]

Here's some Atlassian documentation on the topic:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Managing+Users#ManagingUsers-DeactivatingaUser

Thus far (we're in JIRA 5.0.3), when we deactivate a user, we remove them from any assigned groups and projects and assign them to a group called "Inactive." As the work logs associated with the user remain, we append "(inactive)" to the end of the user's name. We also change the user's email account to a dead-end account address as filter subscriptions persist.

*Sorry about the bold...can't turn it off.

[Mark Symons]

We implemented Jobin's solution... moving ex-users to a group called "left". It's not very elegant but it's easy to do.

Note that a user can still have a project role even if they are not in jira-users.

A new feature aimed at handling inactive users is currently scheduled, ostensibly for JIRA v5.1

Edit: 19th June. I see that the inactive users feature has made it into JIRA v5.1 RC2