Stop disabling access to content when its owner account is deactivated.
If content owner's account is disabled, any collaborators lose access to said content. A different workflow needs to be put into place to allow these collaborators access to content previously shared with them.
Either automatically transfer ownership to a co-owner or when the original owner account is being suspended, add options for preserving access to other collaborators.
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Anonymous commented
Regarding: It would be helpful to clarify what we mean by "deactivating."
We are a large organization, with employees leaving frequently.
When an employee leaves, their account is deactivated.
As a result, we have many tickets (1-2 per day) asking for a folder to be reinstated.
You do have best practice recommendations (https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043694514-Deleting-Managed-Users, https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043693014-Best-Practice-Terminating-Employees), but that is impractical when a user owns many folders.
It would greatly help us if, by default, when an account is deactivated, one co-owner is made the owner (this is what our help desk does when users request recovery of a "lost" folder). If there is more than one co-owner, pick one at random to be the new owner.
If there are no co-owners, pick an editor at random and make them the owner.
Folders belonging to deactivated users remain for 180 days, and then are deleted. We've had instances of data loss because a folder wasn't identified as lost within 180 days.
Many thanks for considering this. -
Anonymous commented
Transferring all content to someone else is not scalable in a large organisation.
Assuming most users have mostly personal notes that are not relevant once they leave the organisation and a smaller amount of stuff that is shared with a team or department and needed after the user leaves. A smaller percentage of users own critical shared folders.
In a large organisation there is a need for a standardised process, as there are too many users coming and going to handle each case individually.
Imagine a process where all content owned by a deleted user is always transferred to the manager of that user. In this case managers would have to delete 90% of the stuff they get transferred, to ensure those 10% that is relevant to keep is not deleted. That is a lot of time wasted sifting through mostly useless stuff.This problem could be solved by allowing Box to automatically transfer ownership of a shared folder if one or more co-owners exists (select one randomly if there are multiple).
Most people I have talked to about this issue seems to assume that is how co-ownership works in the first place and are surprised to learn it is not how it works. So it seems like an intuitive feature. -
AdminAnonymous (Admin, Box) commented
It would be helpful to clarify what we mean by "deactivating." If we are talking about:
(1) Deleting Managed Users and preserving permissions to content for all Invited Collaborators, then this is already possible today. We simply transfer content to someone else, and this is built into our workflow when deleting Managed Users. All access and permissions for Invited Collaborators is preserved.https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043694514-Deleting-Managed-Users
(2) or marking a Managed User as Inactive. When marking an account as Inactive, this will freeze the user’s account, preventing them from making changes to any files. Their content will be frozen for all collaborators too, and Box Sync will also be disabled for the user.
https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043693014-Best-Practice-Terminating-Employees
It would be nice to have a third option where we can mark an account as "Inactive, but Invited Collaborators still have access to content."
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AdminDivya (Admin, Box) commented
hi - Can we have an update on this?