Delete a Worksite Web User?

Hi there. I have just started working on a Worksite Web project. It is an existing installation that has been running for some time. In teaching myself how it all works, I created a user. The IT people here tell me that once a user has been created, it cannot be deleted? Is this correct? I can't seem to find any way to delete a user. What is the rationale behind this behaviour?

In our install, we have external people looking at documents only for certain short or long-term projects. The projects and users come and go. The users do not upload documents or edit them, they view only. Once a project is completed, it is likely that the users who access those documents are "turned off" as well.

Can anyone explain the beahviour for me? Is there a workaround? I don't want to end up with a lengthy list of users that aren't actually being "used".

Cheers.

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JulesB

Hi there. I have just started working on a Worksite Web project. It is an existing installation that has been running for some time. In teaching myself how it all works, I created a user. The IT people here tell me that once a user has been created, it cannot be deleted? Is this correct? I can't seem to find any way to delete a user. What is the rationale behind this behaviour?

In our install, we have external people looking at documents only for certain short or long-term projects. The projects and users come and go. The users do not upload documents or edit them, they view only. Once a project is completed, it is likely that the users who access those documents are "turned off" as well.

Can anyone explain the beahviour for me? Is there a workaround? I don't want to end up with a lengthy list of users that aren't actually being "used".

Cheers.

I think the rationale behind not deleting users is because, generally speaking, users create documents and so appear on a document profile. If you delete a user who has created documents, it will cause problems with the document profiles.

Like you, I have Worksite Web users who are set up for a short time for certain projects and are only allowed to view particular documents. As they never show on any document profiles, when they're finished I just delete them from the database using a simple SQL delete statement.

NB: Although I've done this many times without any problems, it's not a course of action recommended by Interwoven, and my setup may be different from yours. So make sure you either back up your database beforehand, or try it out on a test system first!

Migrateduser

Not being able to "Delete" a user has to do with the data integrity. This way you cannot mistakenly delete a user who has documents associated with them. (Author or Operator). You can "Rename" a user to another user which in turn will remove the old user. A common way to do this is create a "FormerExternal" user and rename all External users to this user to remove the old name from the database. You can have this user disabled so it cannot login. Keep in mind that you can only rename External Users to External Users. It might feel a little out of the norm but it protects admins from doing stupid things.

Hope this helps.

techstop

Thanks for the replies. I knew it had something to do with preserving the audit trail or some such, but in our company's situation is irrelevant. Might investigate the manual deletion of SQL rows. Cheers.