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Deleting user profile in AD kills access to user's My Site by manage

Asked By: Nadia Alvarado Date: Sep 02, 2008 Category: Sharepoint Views: 524

Our company's security policy is to immediately delete user accounts in AD after
an employee leaves the company. We also archive their mailbox in Exchange 2003
to a .pst, give their manager(s) access, and then delete the mailbox.

Well, this worked great until people started using My Sites. A summer intern
recently left, and her account was deleted. Her supervisor received the "The My
Site of [intern] is scheduled for deletion". He called me asking why he
couldn't get into her My Site, and apparently it is because her account was
deleted, not disabled. Using the SharePoint Manager 2007 tool from Codeplex, I
can see that the user's My Site site collection is still there, just not
accessible.

What are my options as SharePoint admin to keep a user's My Site around and
accessible by their manager in this scenario? I've been told that disabling
accounts is not an option in our environment.

Tagged:deleting user profile in ad kills access to users my site by manage

3 Answers Found

Answer #1 Answered By: Sheryl Velez Answered On: Sep 02, 2008

I'm doing a talk on this very topic in two weeks at the Best Practices
Conference in DC.

The manager can still get to the user's mysite to clean it out. But its a bit
harder now. Have them navigate to their own mysite and then change the
loginname in the URL address to be their own. For example:

If the deleted user's login name is 'Todd' and the manager's login name is
'Bill' then the manager's mysite is located at
http://servername/personal/Bill/default.aspx. They should navigate instead to
http://servername/personal/Todd/default.aspx. It will then redirect them to
http://servername/personal/todd/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx. This is the view all
site content page for Todd's Mysite. From there you clean up any documents or
list items necessary. If you've used one of the alternative naming options for
mysites then you'll need to substitute that for the username portion.

Also, be aware that although the manager gets the message that the site will be
deleted it won't be unless you've enabled the dead web cleanup feature in
SharePoint. If that isn't enabled it must be deleted manually.

Answer #2 Answered By: Josephine Buchanan Answered On: Sep 02, 2008

That is a nice workaround.

A couple questions:

- My assumption is that the manager would get full control of the site, and able
to view content in the Personal libraries. Correct?

- Is there any way for me to modify the SharePoint-generated email sent to
managers to change the site link to the one you gave below? That would solve the
workflow issue of managers calling the Help Desk because the current link
doesn't work.

Answer #3 Answered By: Alexandra Lewis Answered On: Sep 02, 2008

- My assumption is that the manager would get full control of the site, and able
to view content in the Personal libraries. Correct?

Reply> Yes, they have full control of the content. They won't be able to view the
home page for the site, but should have access to all the content.

- Is there any way for me to modify the SharePoint-generated email sent to
managers to change the site link to the one you gave below? That would solve the
workflow issue of managers calling the Help Desk because the current link
doesn't work.

Reply> I believe the email is hard coded into the process, but will need to do
some more looking before I can give you a definite answer. It is a very good
question though.

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