Hi all,
We are working on removing abandoned/test books on our network and have been discussing whether and how we should remove users who appear no longer active on the network. This is complicated, as we use SSO and may want to use our university’s IT service for determining which users/email addresses belong to graduated/retired people.
I’m curious if other Network Admins regularly batch remove users from your network, and what your reasoning, criteria and process is for doing so. Thanks!
I didn’t receive any other replies, but for now we have decided to focus on removing inactive books, rather than focusing on users.
One of the complications is that, from emailing with Pressbooks, I learned that “user deletion is total. If a user account were to be deleted, then provisioned anew in the future, the newly provisioned user account would not automatically have access to books that the old, deleted user account belonged to. By deleting a user account, the user is fully deleted, not merely deactivated. If the user gets a new account, they’re starting from scratch on the network.”
At our institution, access to Pressbooks is only allowed for university students, faculty and staff who have an active NetID and who are part of a campus “group” that also determines access to our Libraries databases/electronic resources. I learned from Pressbooks that “Users with existing PB accounts created via SSO can always log in again via SSO, regardless of changes they may or may not have made in their PB user profile. This is because after initial SSO login, user matching during subsequent SSO logins occurs on the basis of a value stored in the user meta that PB profile changes do not affect. However, if the PB user account is deleted, and the person is no longer part of the [UW group that is allowed access], they wouldn’t be able to have a new user account provisioned via SSO in the future.”
So, I’m hesitant to start removing users because it’s not uncommon that people leave the university and then return later (for instance students graduating and later coming back as employees or re-enrolling as students). I’m worried about removing users and then them not being able to use their NetID to log in in the future if they return to the university.