Overview
When employees leave an organization, it's crucial that they no longer have access to the content on Workplace. If an account has not been deactivated, other users in your Workplace will continue to be able to find and message that account, with no indication that the individual has left the company, which is ultimately a poor user experience.
To properly ensure that ex-employees are excluded from seeing your content, Workplace supports account deactivations and deletions. Due to the destructive nature of account deletions, Workplace recommends implementing account deactivation where possible.
Under certain conditions, companies are required to establish a process to remove any personal information that may lead to an individual being identified. To meet such requirements Workplace admins can now remove or mask data from deactivated user profiles via Remove Profile Fields option in the Admin Panel. This will retain posts, comments and messages from the user, but will remove other information, especially PII and the users will appear as Former Members in your Workplace.
Learn more about Removing Profile fields for deactivated accounts.
Deactivated Accounts
When an account is in a deactivated state:
- The user will immediately be logged out from all the existing sessions upon deactivation. Any attempt to log into Workplace will be denied.
- Despite Workplace access being blocked, their profile and content (posts, messages, comments) created by a deactivated user will remain visible to their coworkers. Group chat conversations won't be disrupted, but no one would be able to send new messages directly to that person.
- Users will see an indication that the profile has been deactivated.
- When searching for the user on Workplace, their profile and contents they created are still visible.
- After 4 days, group memberships are automatically removed. Read more about group membership for deactivated accounts.
Former Members
Removal of profile fields is an intermediate step between account deactivation and deletion, which will keep posts, comments and messages created by the target user in Workplace, but will delete or mask their profile information. An account can be marked as “Former Member” only 4 days after account deactivation to prevent any accidental events. Learn more about Removing Profile fields for deactivated accounts.
When an account is marked for “Remove Profile Fields”:
- User’s name will change to “Former Member”
- Data in all profile fields will be removed including profile picture.
- Content in posts or comments would continue to show the user's original name but would not link back to the user's profile.
- Old data can not be associated back to the same account. A new account will have to be created on Workplace if the user rejoins the organization.
Deleted accounts
When an account is in a deleted state:
- Any attempt for the user to log into Workplace will be prevented. The user will immediately be logged out from all the existing sessions.
- All contents (posts, messages, comments) created by a deleted user will be deleted permanently. System admins can’t recover this information unless they implement a DLP or archival process via a custom or third-party integration.
- When searching for the user on Workplace, their profile and contents they created can’t be found anymore.
