Retiring a user account#

This pages describes a possible workflow team admins can follow when a a member leaves the lab. It includes steps to be taken by both the person leaving and the admin of the respective team.

Some facts about the mechanics of eLabFTW relevant for this procedure:

  • Users using a SAML-account will automatically loose access to eLabFTW once their institutional account is terminated.

  • In eLabFTW, users can be either archived or deleted by an admin.

  • A user that is owning experiments cannot be deleted. To maintain documentation, it is imperative that users are not deleted.

  • When a user is archived by an admin:

    • they can no longer log in and

    • all their experiments are 🔒 locked (i.e. can no longer be edited until they are unlocked by an admin with lock power).

    • An archived user can be reactivated by an admin (they need to unlock experiments manually).

  • Beginning with eLabFTW 4.0.0 (June 2021), the ownership of an database items can be transferred.

Depending on how you want to deal with experiments of the leaving user, we propose the following workflow:

Workflow 2: Hide experiments of retired users#

If it is not desired to keep old experiments available, e.g. to reduce the number of search results, these can be moved to a designated group for archiving. The admin will retain access to these experiments and can restore them to be accessible, if needed. This workflow assumes that the admin has already created a group called Archive in their respective team (you can choose any name for this).

When a user is leaving the institution:

  1. The User transfers ownership of all collaborative experiments and items to the responsible collaborator. For experiments, this requires making a copy of the experiment.

  2. The User brings all of their experiments into a finished state (in default configuration these are the States Success, Fail, Need to be redone) and preferably timestamps them.

  3. User and Admin collaboratively set the visibility of all of their experiments (if suitable) to the group Archive[1]. Warning: Make sure that no important information is lost (like association with specific projects) or unwillingly exposed by transferring group access.

  4. The Admin archives the user’s account (Admin panel → Users search for the user name, press Archive User).

After this, the experiments are only visible to members of the Archive group. Note that this also includes admins that are not part said groups. To access these experiments, a user (or admin) must either be added to the Archive group, or the visibility of the experiments needs to be changed again (e.g. to Team).