Change Admin, Switch to Different Company and Integrate with Clockify

[John Andrew McMillen]

Hi.  I am an attorney and my prior legal assistant set up Trello with her as Admin.  She is no longer with me, so is there a way to make me the admin?

Also, I have since left that law firm and opened my own.  Is there a way to make the new firm the one for my former board?  Trello only contains my projects and clients.

Finally, I just added Clockify and am trying to integrate Trello with it.  I assume it may be tied into the above questions since Clockify is set up under my new firm and email.  Any tips on how to tie those together.

Thanks!

[Nils Geylen]

I've done a (small) organisation "split" where somebody left with a usage license to a number of their original boards.

They simply set up their existing Trello account as the new hub for their Workspaces and made me the admin to all.

I was also an admin to the stay-behind-boards already, so I just copied the relevant boards to their Workpaces and that was that.

However!

This case differs, in that your former assistant has gone and does not need these boards, but does own her account. Or was it a company account?

Trello is "collaborative" in the sense that any user can get to be invited to any board, but (outside of Enterprise) sometimes users (need to) have company email accounts. That's something to expand on and look into first.

Also, did your assistant have a separate workspace for that company or your work, or did she just put everything into her own account? Or is that company still there and owner of that space?

Plus!

• You obviously have to be(come) an admin on the original space
• Whoever owns the original now, they need to add you as an admin to that space (or at least to those boards)
• If the original had Standard or Premium features, I'd suggest you'd best have that on the new space too
• There are some restrictions on what gets copied; Trello assumes copies to be new cards so todos, dates, custom fields, comments and activity will or might not cross over
• Attachments I'm not sure, but attached links to external services do get copied (eg. Dropbox et al.)
• Powerups may not move over and that makes sense if those are paid by the original owner
• I have known some user rights issues to pop up but forget what exactly--had to do with the original board creator I think; but since you'd be admin of both I can't imagine a lot of those to arise

Long story short, IMO copying should just work fine, and you can run a simple test first.

Better, but more complicated: take over the assistant's account (if they had a company email, then arrange this with your former company) and change the account to your new company (but then you'd have to ditch any new company account you already had).

This could be straightforward if it's simple boards moving spaces under full control, but could be complicated at first to sort things out for sure.

I do advise to check/wait for official support here. (My little legal disclaimer ;-) And, this is just what I'd do offhand; maybe specialist migration tools do exist.

And do check the resources and documentation ahead.

Hope this sets out some of the issues at hand and boosts your thread.

[John Andrew McMillen]

Thanks so much for your detailed answer and I'll see if anyone else chimes in  I am pretty sure the account was set up with her as admin under her work email with me as a user, so I am not sure if I can take over that account or not.

I may try to set up a new board with me as admin and see if it allows me to copy the board over.

Regards and let me know if you think of anything else.

[Nils Geylen]

Two things came up rereading this.

I spoke too soon about ditching any new company account you may now be using.

Let's say your former company was called Old-Law-Firm and your new business is called Attorney-John, then whatever the workspace back then was called, whoever owned or paid for it, as soon as you get temporary access to that space, nothing stops you from adding you@attorney-john as an admin, change the billing info, change the workspace name and remove the old-firm admins from that workspace and you're done.

Even if Old Law Firm still wants to use Trello, their account is still theirs and they can create or keep whatever workspaces they might want.

In our case where one person left, we did have to go for the copy option because we also needed to maintain access to the active workspace and the same boards; each of us just went their own way with those.

People sometimes confuse the user account with the workspace. Trello isn't like a self-hosted intranet where one IT dept. manages everything--well, I guess the Enterprise plan is, in a way. For most of us it's more akin to a Facebook group really, that you can transfer and invite people to. Depends on your organisational structure, really.

The same goes for your former colleague: even if she managed things from a private email address, if she still owns that account (and kept your stuff) she can put all that in a dedicated workspace apart from her own, add you as an admin an leave herself. She will keep her user account with Trello minus one workspace. Her billing remains unchanged for that, and you change the billing on yours.

And even if Old Law Firm had an inbox called colleague@old-law-firm, and that's now gone along with said colleague, their IT could still temporarily open that inbox again for you to work with while you transfer the accounts. Or, they might be quite skilled and manage all this for you: reopen the account, reopen the space and boards, add you and leave.

Of course, all these solutions require friendly relations and some trust.

It can be a bit of brain twister at first but it can be done.

If you end up getting all the info: who did what, who owned what workspaces and what are the current needs and wants from the people involved, I'm certainly willing to think along again, or others might jump in.

[Nils Geylen]

Oh and yes, nothing is stopping you from having an account as johnmcmillen@gmail or whatever, and an account as john@attorney-john and have them both be admin for your business, but use only one for daily work.

Well, there's cost, obviously, but I see a lot of people losing access over account issues but if it's really important, why not?

If you decide to have your company get Premium, you could even get 'John' to be a member and keep the head login safe.

I have my private account to get into 'my' Trello, I have another that's added to our work team, I have a test user account there as well, and the organisation have their own admin and a backup 'owner' account.

We totally rely on it, so I think that's sound policy. 

Enough though, good luck!