We are challenged with retaining certain data as a result of deactivating a user when they leave the company. More in-depth analysis is being done but so far the impact seems to be in the following areas:

Supervisor field
Resource Mgr field
Resource Type field
Project Manager field (profile)
Resource Availability
Scheduled Cost
Estimated Cost
Actual Cost
Workgroup assignments
Timesheets (completed/approved)
Timesheets (completed/submitted/not approved)
Timesheets (completed/not submitted)
Tasks Scheduled Work
Remaining Scheduled Work
Allocations (past)
Allocations (future)
What happens to history when Billing Rate changes after they leave?
Project Membership

Please share your experience or advice on the steps to deactivating a user without negatively impacting the data.

Configuration:
Client hosted environment
PPM6 Summer '07 Edition

There are two different ways you can deactivate a user, depending on what your intended purpose is for the deactivation:

Deactivating a user is the functional equivalent of removing or deleting a user in the system.  This removes them from all projects, assignments, user/member picklists, and denies them access to the application.  However, any historical data they have in the system, including Task Updates/Work Entries, Documents, records they created, are retained.

If you need to remove a user, but want to keep their project memberships, assignments, et cetera, even temporarily, you can convert them to an External Resource rather than deactivating them.  When you convert them to an External Resource, their access to the application is cut off and the license they were assigned can be reallocated, but their project memberships and assignments remain unchanged.  For most practical purposes, an External Resource is simply a regular user who can't log into the system.  This way you can effectively remove the user from the system without losing the things they're working on until you can reassign their work.

External Resources have all the attributes of an active user, including Resource Type, Billing Rate, Supervisor, et cetera, and you can manage them exactly as you would an active resource, including converting them back to an active user, when they can log back in and basically pick up where you left them.

Regarding Billing Rate history, we are introducting historical Billing Rate tracking in our Fall 08 release for all resources, active and external.

I've noticed that when a user is made an external user, their supervisor & resource manager information is lost if the supervisor/resource manager is also an external user or inactive.

Also, only active users are in the supervisor/resource manager list, so external users cannot be selected as a supervisor/resource manager.

I'm finding when doing prompted reports, if the supervisor is not populated the records are ommitted from the report.

From a systems management standpoint, I would like to retain the supervisor/resource manager information to ease in the transition to active user.

Are there any plans to retain the supervisor/resource manager information, even if the supervisor/resource manager is external as well?

Please advise. (maybe I should post it to the community?)

Thank you.

 -Nathanael

 Not likey due to the fact that Supervisor and Resource Manager designations are tied into features that only a logged in user may use.  Approvals being the key element.  If in a given approval policy the Supervisor is the approver (in a chain of approval events) and if that designated supervisor were an external resource then it would freeze the approval routing at that point because there is no way for an ER to login and approve.

 Please vote for the greenhouse item:

Prompt when deactivating Supervisors and Resource managers

 http://community.daptiv.com/Greenhouse/t/957.aspx