Need guidance on how to remove/de activate users without loosing their data

[Shanmuka]

Hi Team,

We have many people left the organization but they are still consuming the Jira licenses. we want to remove/de activate those users but want to retain their activities/data i.e. their tickets/comments/attachments etc. has to be transferred to others. Any guidance on how to achieve this? 

We are using multiple active directories  and our Jira is server version.

One more Q, I see 14k users in user management/database statistics where as we have only 4k licenses(2K JSW, 2k JSD). Why is this discrepancy?

Thanks

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_ · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Re: discrepancy – you seem to be pulling all users from AD but only some of these are members of the product groups (you can see these in Jira Admin/Applications/Application Access).

These are the only ones that count towards the license, everyone else is unlicensed and since you mentioned that you have JSD – will be considered an End-User who can use Customer Portal for free.

If you have AD integration the proper way to deactivate would be to do it automatically from AD – if these people have left organisation, why are these accounts still active?

If your AD integration is in delegated authentication mode – you will need an app that will allow you to do bulk user actions like our UserManagement for Jira. Feel free to install on eval license and do what you need to do. Consider buying afterwards. Reach out to our 24x7 support if needed.

When a user is deactivated their data does not disappear, but it won't be transferred to others either. Normally – there is no need and in fact in some contexts would be forbidden. 

On the Server the only way (besides direct db manipulations) to transfer such data to another user is to use one of the GDPR-related anonymising apps, as some of them have functionality to replace a user with another user, e.g., User Anonymizer for Jira (GDPR). Please test thoroughly, your mileage may vary.

[Shanmuka]

HI @Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_ Thanks for your response.  I checked the users with JQL, It seems they were deactivated but tickets and everything is assigned to them only. What is the standard practice in terms of users and their data when they left the organization? Perhaps I could have rephrased my Q properly wrt licenses.

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

If a user is an employee than this is not their data in most cases, but organisation's. For anything borderline e.g. avatar picture, private space in Confluence – the privacy-related anonymiser applications should help.

In most cases you'd just deactivate the user and that's it.

If you have open issues assigned to the user – you'd re-assign them in bulk. For closed issues, content, comments, attachments – why erase history, it's only bound to create confusion?

[Andreas Springer _Actonic_]

If you want to retain the information in your Jira tickets, while removing all private data of employees who have left the organization, you can transfer the ownership of relevant information in Jira to another user. Use a real user, or you can create a dummy user for this scenario.

In order to transfer relevant data and anonymize old users, you can use additional tools from the Marketplace.

Our GDPR solution is one of the possibilities, where you can transfer the ownership and even deactivate the user at the same time. By doing so, you should also have no discrepancy between the activated users and licenses anymore.