Is there a better way to completely remove user access via the API?

bsikes

Hello,

We're beginning to look into integrating the removal of a user's Smartsheet account as part of our employee offboarding process. My intent was to use the API for this functionality so that it could be automated.

Unfortunately, I'm not finding the API endpoints available to accomplish this task in a relatively small amount of steps. I'm able to remove the account from our organization, but they're still shared on items as well as part of groups in our organization (I specified the removeFromSharing, transferSheets, and transferTo elements). I know I could loop through all the groups, sheets, reports, and workspaces in our organization and remove access when it's found, but I'm hoping there's a better way that I'm missing.

When done manually, it's as simple as using the "Revoke Access to Items..." option within User Management, but I don't see this functionality exposed in the API.

Am I missing something, or is this just not easily available through the API? We're on a Business Plan.

Thank you!

Genevieve P.

Hello hello! Jumping in here as this is an old thread with historical information.

An update for anyone looking at this thread currently: you can Remove users through the API: https://smartsheet.redoc.ly/tag/users#operation/remove-user

Cheers,
Genevieve

Jeff Reisman

@bsikes The user deletion capabilities are completely messed up right now.

The Remover User method has been deprecated and does not work.

Deactivate User, while it removes the user's ability to access Smartsheet in any way, it still leaves all their Shares intact - so they still show up on sheets as having access, and on the downloaded Sheet Access reports. And Business Plan SysAdmins can't even access this method anyway.

At this time, there is no reasonable way to remove a user's shares through the API without going through every sheet, report, workspace, dashboard...

bsikes

Thanks for the response @Jeff Reisman

That's unfortunate, but is what I was expecting. To help facility our manual process, I've at least setup a daily process to get a list of all our Smartsheet users and cross reference those with our employee directory. If a user exists that's not in our directory we should be alerted to that.

Jeff Reisman

@bsikes Yeah that's about all you can do.

I just get cc'd on email notifications to our support team re: termination IT tickets. My process is to remove the user from sharing and groups, and then deactivate the user. I've set up a monthly reminder to myself to delete deactivated users during the daily delete window (1:30pm Eastern - 9:00am Eastern.

Genevieve P.

Hello hello! Jumping in here as this is an old thread with historical information.

An update for anyone looking at this thread currently: you can Remove users through the API: https://smartsheet.redoc.ly/tag/users#operation/remove-user

Cheers,
Genevieve

bsikes

Hi @Genevieve P. !

Just double checking - has the remove-user api call been updated to work properly? Looking at previous comments in this thread, it's been available, but didn't work properly (at least a year ago it didn't).

Thank you!

Genevieve P.

Hi @bsikes

At the time of the original post, the deactivate/remove user experience (through the UI and API) was going through some changes which is what was preventing the API from being able to make those updates. This was then resolved in April, 2023 - here's an historical announcement with more information.

Cheers,
Genevieve