Deactivating users in Appian

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

gaurav_laturkar — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 06:45:06 GMT

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.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Phil Barton — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 07:15:52 GMT

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.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

venkatrea696188 — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 16:36:19 GMT

[quote userid="282876" url="~/discussions/f/best-practices/27291/deactivating-users-in-appian/137067"] an error is returned and can only be resolved be reactivating[/quote]

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) .

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Phil Barton — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 12:44:32 GMT

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)?

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

venkatrea696188 — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 11:53:06 GMT

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

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Phil Barton — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 11:35:04 GMT

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?

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 14:44:42 GMT

Discuss this with your Appian account exec, but in my experience the counting of active users is pretty flexible.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Gopinath Balu — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 14:39:08 GMT

If not covered under an enterprise license, will you be charged for the active user?

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Mike Schmitt — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:23:01 GMT

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.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

sarathkumar13 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:22:07 GMT

i had saved and published it. I thought my name will pop up but still his name is only coming. Really not sure what I am missing

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Peter Lewis — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:19:46 GMT

Did you Save and Publish or just Save? You must publish for it to change the process designer. FWIW I also strongly recommend that you always save and publish because it creates a new major version each time and is easier to troubleshoot / rollback as necessary.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

sarathkumar13 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:56:56 GMT

I have one process model which i have saved recently and its configured to run as whoever designed the process model. When it gets executed, it is showing started by as the previous designer name in monitoring mode and not my name. We both are system admins for the environment. Any comments on this behaviour Peter??

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

sarathkumar13 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:47:10 GMT

Thank you so much stefan

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:43:42 GMT

Not at all.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Peter Lewis — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:43:28 GMT

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.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

sarathkumar13 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:41:01 GMT

Thanks stefan. Will it have any impacts on the objects which are saved by them?

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

sarathkumar13 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:39:06 GMT

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??

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Peter Lewis — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:35:39 GMT

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.

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:59:46 GMT

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

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

testbasicu8831 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:56:11 GMT

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

RE: Deactivating users in Appian

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:11:15 GMT

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?