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sarathkumr268295
sarathkumr268295
January 23, 2023
Question

Deactivating users in Appian

  • January 23, 2023
  • 21 replies
  • 0 views

What will happen to the objects that are last modified by a user whose account is going to be deactivated soon?
What are the precautionary steps that need to be taken while deactivating a user in appian? What about process models which are configured to run as whoever designed the process model??

21 replies

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
January 23, 2023

In general, I do not recommend to deactivate users. The reason is that ANY process that runs in that user context will fail. This includes active instances started by that user, but also the configurations you mentioned.

Why do you want to deactivate users?

    T
    testbasicu8831
    January 23, 2023

    Hi Stefan,

    Lets assume if the user is leaving the organization we generally deactivate the user to remove the tool access.

    So what steps can we take to handle this kind of scenario?

    Thanks in Advance

    stefanhelzle0001
    stefanhelzle0001
    January 23, 2023

    All my clients use some type of single sign on. Once the user is removed there, he/she has no access to Appian anymore.

    peter.lewis
    peter.lewis
    Employee
    January 23, 2023

    Which environment are you working on in this case? There are two scenarios I can think of:

    • If this is in Development, then deactivating a user could affect scheduled processes. However, the impact here would usually be minor since it's your development environment, so you could check for process errors after the user is deactivated and pretty easily re-publish any process models they created.
    • If this is in Production, then you shouldn't have any process models that are last saved by a user account. If following good DevOps practices, you should always deploy as a service account which will not be deactivated, so deactivating any user shouldn't have any effect.
    sarathkumr268295
    sarathkumr268295Author
    January 23, 2023

    I am thinking about development environment. What about the objects that are saved by the person whose user account is going to be deactivated? Will it cause any problem in future??

    peter.lewis
    peter.lewis
    Employee
    January 23, 2023

    The only objects that matter are process models, and the only reason those matter is if they are configured to run as whoever designed the process model. Typically anyone working on those processes will republish them anyway once they make changes, so it isn't usually much of a problem.

    mikes0011
    mikes0011
    Brainy
    January 23, 2023

    For Dev designer users, the approach I've found best is to change their username slightly and add them to the "Service Accounts" group.  This prevents them from logging in, and prevents them from auto-expiring (hence any impacts on running instances).  Once you're sure there are no more running instances under that account's authority, you can deactivate them more permanently.

    gaurav_laturkar
    gaurav_laturkar
    August 12, 2024

    The deployments from Dev > QA > Prod should happen using a service account. So even if the developer account is deactivated in Dev, on higher env the objects are owned by service account & service acc is never deactivated.

    In Dev, any object created by the developer (mainly process models) need to be republished after the user is deactivated.

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