Basic Administration > Managing User Participation > Participant Administration > Understanding Participants (Users, Groups, and Organizations) > Using the Participant Administration Utility > Managing Users > Deleting Users
  
Deleting Users
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Do not delete a user unless you understand how it affects the system, as described in this section.
These two actions result in deleting a user:
• Delete from Windchill
• Delete from Windchill and Windchill Directory Server
The first action has the effect of deleting the user from the Windchill database. The second action deletes the user from both the Windchill database and the user directory service. To use the second action, you must have the required permissions to be able to delete users from the directory service as well as the database.
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You cannot delete users that are owned by a read-only directory server.
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You cannot delete the Administrator or the Administrators group. You also cannot delete your own user object.
The results of deleting a user from the Windchill database are:
• The user is removed from all groups.
• All access control policy rules that specifically identify the user are removed.
• The user is removed from all notification lists within notification policy rules and, if deleting the user from the list results in an empty list, then the rule is also deleted.
• If the user was a member of a local or shared team, the user row in the Members table includes (Deleted) after the user name to inform the team that the user has been deleted. The deleted user can then be replaced or removed from the team.
• A user can be created with an identical user name as a user that was previously deleted, but if the original user's personal cabinet was not deleted, the new personal cabinet will have a different name. For more information, see Naming a User's Personal Cabinet.
• If a deleted user is specified as the user of a collection defined in the index properties, a stack trace prints in the method server log when an attempt is made to index an object.
The following rules govern tasks associated with a workflow process when a user is deleted from the Windchill database:
• If a user is deleted after a workflow process has been initiated, but prior to assignment of a task, the user is removed from the list of participants and no task is assigned. The value of the wt.property called ignoreUnresolvedRoles decides if the task should be completed or assigned to the responsible role.
• If the user is deleted after a workflow process has been initiated, and a task has been assigned, that task must be manually reassigned. The task will be reassigned to a context creator.
For more information, see Reassigning a Task.
• A deleted user continues to appear in iteration history, object properties pages, and so on, but the name is not displayed as an email link.
• When a user is deleted, the user is automatically removed from the list of participants in any workflow process template. The user is also removed from any role mappings created as part of a life cycle or team definition. The change does not result in an iteration to the workflow or life cycle templates.
• If a user is identified as a participant in a workflow template definition and that user is deleted from the system after the workflow has been initiated, any task that would have been assigned to the user is assigned to the Responsible Role which is generally the user who initiated the process.
• If both the template creator and a user identified in a workflow process template are deleted after the workflow process is initiated, the workflow process stops until the tasks assigned to the deleted user are manually reassigned.
The results of deleting a user from both the Windchill database and the directory service include all results described earlier for deleting a user from the Windchill database and additionally include the following:
• A user is not authenticated when attempting to log into Windchill.
• The user's name is not included in search results.
If a user is not removed from the user directory service, a new user object is created in Windchill database when the user tries to log on or when the user is selected from a search. This new user object is not the same object that was deleted, and all of the results of the earlier deletion are still true. For example, the user is no longer a member of the groups to which the user had been a member.
After deleting a user from the Windchill database, you must perform the following clean-up steps:
• Reassign any items in the user's list of tasks.
• Unlock any objects the user has checked out of the Windchill database.
• Remove the user's personal cabinet and any folders or objects within it. From Windchill PDMLink, use Site > Utilities > Personal Cabinets Administration.