When the fourth dimension comes to remove a user from a Thou Suite domain, administrators are faced with ii apparently mutually exclusive goals:

  • Delete the user business relationship to recover the annual seat license fee
  • Preserve all the data in the user business relationship in the event that the data is yet needed

G Suite domain administrators can foursquare that circle with these unproblematic deprovisioning steps.

ane. Change the Departing User's Password

Changing the departing user's countersign accomplishes two goals. First, information technology locks the user out of the account, preventing any post-departure access (malicious or otherwise). Second, it allows you, the admin, to log into that account to perform whatever changes or data transfers not possible from the Chiliad Suite Ambassador Control Console. (If the account has 2-Step Verification installed, yous'll demand to disable it, too.)

Yous can change the user's countersign from the Users & Organization Tab in your Command Panel. After selecting a new countersign, be sure to click the Reset Sign-In Cookies link to end any logged-in sessions the departing user may still be running.

2. Download a Snapshot of the User Account for Safekeeping

Downloading the consummate contents of a user account to an offline file is a best exercise earlier altering or deleting the account. This preserves the data in the user's core G Suite—Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Bulldoze and Sites— as it was before the deprovisioning process, maintaining records-retention compliance and ensuring no vital data is lost.

To export your user's data, Google recommends the following:

  1. Open the data export tool.
  2. Tip: To do this from the Google Admin console: at the height right, click Open Open, and under Tools, click data export.
  3. Click Start consign.

3. Identify an Business relationship "Executor"

Someone at your system is going to inherit the departing user's responsibilities, and thus their data—at least in the brusk run. Place that employee, as he or she will go the Executor of the data in the departed account, transferring or responding to it as needed. (In many cases, the Domain Ambassador and the Executor are one in the same, then you may be giving all these permissions to yourself.)

4. Fix Upwards the Departing User'south Vacation Auto-Responder

Log into the departing user's account with the new password, and so ready upwards the vacation auto-responder to inform correspondents that the user is no longer with your organization, and to identify to whom they should direct all future inquiries. (Likely this will be the same Executor). Be sure to enable the auto-responder for recipients both inside and exterior your domain.

5. Delegate Access to the Departing User's Email

The account Executor will demand access to whatever pending correspondence in the departing user's mailbox, especially if the difference was sudden or occurred on less than friendly terms. Fortunately, you tin can designate access to a One thousand Suite mail account to anyone else on your domain.

The delegate—who, again, volition likely be the Executor—won't be able to change business relationship permissions, passwords or chat on the original user's behalf, but the consul tin can ship and receive mail from the business relationship until it is suspended or deleted. To delegate postal service access, log into Gmail equally the departed user and follow the delegation instructions in the Postal service Settings menu.

6. Transfer Ownership of the Parting User's Google Docs

When the account that owns a Google Doc, Google Sail or Google Slide is deleted, that document is deleted as well—fifty-fifty if it was shared with other domain users. Put more merely, deleting a user deletes every critical document that user e'er created.

Fortunately, the Yard Suite Ambassador Control Console offers a method to majority-transfer ownership of all a user's Google Drive documents to another domain user's business relationship. In other words, you tin can make the Executor the owner of all Docs from a departing user, in a matter of seconds, ensuring that this information stays online and attainable even after the original owner is de-provisioned. The Executor can then transfer private document ownership on a instance-by-case footing.

7. Add together the Departing User's Contacts to the 1000 Suite Directory

If you have enabled contact sharing to create a common G Suite Directory of business organisation-oriented contacts for your domain, y'all may want to add at least some of the departing user's Contacts to the Directory. If the departing user was the exclusive point of reference for a central customer or partner, you may desire to make that external contact's address available to everyone. There is no native functionality for adding external contacts to the Directory, simply the free version of SherpaTools allows administrators to import contacts in bulk to the Directory, and for individual users to share contacts with the Directory.

8. Delegate Access to the Parting User's Calendars

If the departing user managed a shared calendar, or simply had a serial of company appointments that the Executor must at present manage, it is important to transfer control of those calendars. Simply log in as the departing user, and then follow the Share With Specific Users instructions to give the Executor the Edit Events And Manage Sharing access level for the appropriate calendars. The Executor can then dole out calendar permissions as needed.

9. Transfer Buying of the Parting User's Groups

From the M Suite Administrator Control Panel, select Users, select the departing user's business relationship, then select Groups to meet a list of all groups of which the departing user is a member. And so click the Edit Grouping Membership link. Add together the Executor every bit a member to each of these groups and, if the departing user is the Owner of the grouping, drag the Executor to Owner status. The Executor can then subsequently assign Ownership to the advisable employee(due south).

ten. Audit the Departing User'southward Non-Core Thousand Suite Services

While Thousand Suite domains directly control a user'due south Gmail, Docs, Contacts, Calendars and Sites, a G Suite domain business relationship can be used to access dozens of non-cadre G Suite services, including AdWords, Google Analytics, Blogger, Feedburner, Google Phonation and YouTube. When you finally delete the parting user, his or her non-core accounts will also be deleted—along with all the content in those accounts. You don't want your website'due south Feedburner RSS feed or Google Analytics account to disappear when you delete the departing user.

Most of these non-cadre services have straightforward methods for transferring buying of, or access to, an business relationship. Virtually all of them enable acceptable information consign via Google's Takeout. Log into every not-core Google service your organisation uses with the departing user's credentials, and then assess whether key data needs to be transferred before you delete the departing user.

Y'all should perform the same steps for any G Suite Marketplace products installed on your domain to ensure no disquisitional functionality or data is lost when you remove the departing user'south account. All the Marketplace Apps installed on your domain are listed in the Thou Suite Administrator Control Panel.

11. Prepare a Agenda Reminder For Yourself to Delete the Departing User In 90 Days

While you're probably broken-hearted to delete an account and immediately recover the $50 annual seat license fee, it'due south a smart idea to keep the account effectually for a few months just to make sure that

  • The departing employee isn't reinstated
  • No critical data is placed out of easy access while your organization adjusts to the difference
  • Your not-core services audit was accurate and complete

12. Delete the Departing User's Account

Yes, finally.

Hither are the steps:

  • Sign in to your Google Admin console.
  • From the Admin console Home page, go to Users.
  • In the Users list, find the user. For details, encounter find a user account.
  • Bespeak to the user you want to delete and click More than and then Delete user.
  • If you're a delegated admin, check the boxes to ostend that yous understand the bear upon of deleting the account.

To transfer buying of user content, you lot must be a super admin:

  • Bank check the boxes next to each selection that you want.
  • In the Transfer to box, enter the first few characters of the user's proper noun or email address that you desire to transfer the files to. When yous meet the account you want, select it.
  • Click Delete User or Delete Users.

When the data is transferred and the account deleted, Google will electronic mail the contacts you gear up up in "Company profile" and then "Profile" and then "Contact information".

13. Create a Grouping With the Same Post Address As the Deleted User

Just because you deleted a departing user doesn't hateful people outside your arrangement will cease sending him or her of import emails.

While your domain's catch-all email address tin handle these misdirected emails, you may non want the catch-all recipient to be the but person dealing with the departed user'southward correspondence. Instead, fix a Group with the same email address as the one formerly used by the deleted user, and then add the Executor and whatever other relevant recipients to the Group. This will ensure that anyone who didn't receive the auto-responder has his or her mails routed to the advisable recipient.

Follow these steps and you tin remove a G Suite user from your domain with minimal chance to your information and your business organisation. Setting upwardly and editing external postal service servers in conjunction with adding or removing users can be a complex process.

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