Deactivating users in Appian

Certified Senior Developer

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??

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  • Certified Lead Developer

    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?

  • In my scenario, basic users that contribute and leave an audit trail entry in our tables cannot be deactivated without a subsequent error message. To mitigate these users from being able to be chosen for tasks ever again we can only mark them as "DO NOT SELECT" in their surname. This is crude, effective, but an ugly user experience (especially as they still appear in group dropdowns. Are there any best practices for 'hiding' these users, whilst maintaining a record of their contributions?

  • Certified Senior Developer
    in reply to Phil Barton

    Maintaining groups or a table specific to users available for the selection and not (Moving them to a group being a container).

  • Tasks or call-ups refer back to a basic user within a record entry. If a user is then deactivated (i.e. leaves the company), an error is returned and can only be resolved be reactivating. Given that the 'deactivate user' functionality is present in Prod. does guidance/best practice exist (specifically to avoid errors)?

  • Certified Senior Developer
    in reply to Phil Barton
    an error is returned and can only be resolved be reactivating

    This gonna go back and forth after completion again you need to deactivate.

    I don't know how helpful my suggestion would be but, Upon deactivating User update the record entry values  with some service account  (If you don't need to know about particular user) . 

  • Therein lies the problem with the deactivate user functionality. From an audit perspective we need to retain who made which entries and when. Overtyping 000s/ 0000s of row entries is not a valid option to maintain data integrity.  Deactivation only works for non-participative/read-only users who have left the business.  I'm sure that this is not a unique position for any company using Appian to come across.

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  • Therein lies the problem with the deactivate user functionality. From an audit perspective we need to retain who made which entries and when. Overtyping 000s/ 0000s of row entries is not a valid option to maintain data integrity.  Deactivation only works for non-participative/read-only users who have left the business.  I'm sure that this is not a unique position for any company using Appian to come across.

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