What happens when you delete AD user Accounts of resigned employees?

[#1]

Before deleting an AD (active directory) user account of resigned employees, you should understand what impact this will have on a workflow if that account is part of a workflow.

This will all depends on the role of the user in the workflow; because of this we've included a couple examples of what can happen if a user have been deleted.

• The workflow attempts to send an email to the deleted user i.e. Assign Flexi Task or Request Approval, the workflow will fail to resolve the user to an email address and the workflow will error (stop) saying user not found.
• An unanswered workflow task that had previously been assigned to a now deleted user will sit and wait for a response that will never come.

To address these issues, you can:

• Manually delegate the task to another user (this will depend on how the assigning action was configured, as to whether this is possible. This would also involve manually visiting each task to manually delegate it to another user).

• Use the NWAdmin command line tool (available to Farm Administrator accounts only) to reassign all outstanding tasks from one user to another user. See NWAdmin Operations - Nintex Workflow 2013 orNWAdmin Operations - Nintex Workflow 2010.pdf‌

[yvette]

Hi Emily,

Thanks for this post!

I have a question though as this addresses task actions only while workflows will also error and have to be terminated when a send message action can't be completed. For instance, in our organization we have workflows that run for longer periods of time and will send confirmation messages when certain (or all) actions in the workflow have been completed. If the user - usually the initiator - receiving such a message has left the organization in the meantime and the account has been deleted from the AD, the workflow will error on this step and has to be terminated. 

Is there a solution for this? Does Nintex offer the option to not error the workflow when a send message action can't be completed and instead alert the farm administrator and have the workflow continue on as normal?

Regards,

Yvette

[jpmhuls]

There's even a 3rd scenario/action that will fail: Set Item Permissions. Sometimes, for history purposes a user is still listed in one of the Person/Group columns of an item or document and a workflow using this to set item level permissions also fails. However, one could check the user ID to be > 0 before using it.

[dlgross]

It would be great if you would provide an action to help us find WFs that involved deactivated accounts so that we could be proactive in mitigating any potential issues.