Important: Changes to the “delete user” process next week

Daniel Medved

Hello Community members,

As we work towards simplifying the user and asset management experience for Sysadmins, we need to make some changes to how you delete users that may impact your admin experience. Please note that these changes will take effect on April 11th, 2023. 

One of the pain points we’ve heard from our customers relates to how assets must be transferred when a stakeholder is deleted from Smartsheet. The details of this process can sometimes cause confusion or misunderstanding - for SysAdmins and users alike.

As part of the roadmap to address this and other issues, moving forward delete will be separated into three discrete steps. Specifically, moving forward, to delete a user, SysAdmins must manually 1) transfer ownership of assets and groups  2) remove sharing from all assets and 3) select “delete user”. Read more about this change here. 

We acknowledge that implementing this change may cause additional work in the short term for you. However, this is a required step as we work on some larger changes that will ultimately make your ongoing management of Smartsheet more efficent

Note: this change only applies to “delete user”. Smartsheet continues to recommend user deactivation as the preferred and most stable way of revoking someone’s access to Smartsheet. Deactivation has a few immediate advantages over deletion, while maintaining a high standard for the security of your Smartsheet data. 

Thank you,

The Smartsheet Team

Edit: April 11, 2023

Hi Community Members,

The changes to the delete user are now live. Please see the post above for more details regarding this change.

Samuel Mueller

@Daniel Medved I though the delete user option was completely removed and deactive was the only option. Did I miss something?

Daniel Medved

@Samuel Mueller It was indeed temporarily removed as part of a series of changes implemented as part of this work. This update provides the most recent summary of how customers can access delete user.

Samuel Mueller

Thank you for the clarification!

Jon Brehaut

There's still a massive gap in the process though. You are still unable to do anything with 'Pending' users; you cannot disable them and you cannot delete them, you literally have no option to do anything with these users, or am I missing something here?

Daniel Medved

@Jon Brehaut Thanks for asking! This change should not have any impact on your ability to delete pending users from the admin center.

Since that user type cannot create any assets or own groups, you should still be able to directly delete any pending users using the normal process from within the Admin Center.

Steve LaVelle

@Daniel Medved Pending users are still restricted from Deletion with the message "You can No Longer Perform This Action" and have been since the initial removal of administrators ability to delete. As a result, an attempt to create an account that has a typographical error in the email address cannot neither be edited or deleted.

Daniel Medved

@Steve LaVelle Thanks for letting us know! After looking into this, it appears you’re experiencing some unexpected behavior that shouldn’t be occurring. I’ve reported it to my team and we’re working on a fix that should be rolled out soon.

In the meantime, you can delete the relevant users from within your User Management screen in the Legacy Account Administration UI. That can be found when clicking “Plan & Billing Info...” after expanding your Account icon in the bottom left corner of Smartsheet.

Steve LaVelle

@Daniel Medved Thank you Daniel, I was able to delete the pending account by going through "Planning & Billing Info" to the legacy User Management (to be honest I did not even know existed), instead of going directly to User Management from the Account pop-up menu or through the Admin Center manage users link, where the error occurs.

Daniel Medved

@Steve LaVelle Excellent! Glad to hear you were able to get to the intended result. Also pleased to share that it appears our fix will go live later today or tomorrow. Thanks again for letting us know about the issue!

Jon Brehaut

@Steve LaVelle@Daniel Medved Thanks for the tip, like @Steve LaVelle I'd never even noticed this option, I'll use this for now to delete pending users until such time as a fix is made as you mention in the earlier post (I have the same issue as described by him)

Daniel Medved

Circling back on this (a little late) to let you all know that a fix to the issue in the comments was deployed this Wednesday, and all functionality should be working as described in the initial post above.