Private Gallery Subscriptions for Members

[mbarone]

It would be useful if the Admin of a Private Gallery (in house server) could delete studios and/or members.  Also, it's confusing that a member who's added also gets a Studio automatically set up.  Members (for my purposes) are only supposed to be able to run apps in collections that I grant them access to.  They should not get their own studio.  Even if they can't use the studio (or even know that they have a studio), it's not very efficient to have all these studios show up on the subscriptions screen.

[JohnPelletier]

@mzomparelli @mbarone  and others, I know this is a pain point for you, and believe me as the PM, we have wanted to do this for years. In fact, the topic has come up internally twice over the last two days.

It's a very difficult challenge for the dev team because of the underlying tech that was chosen several years ago. We are slowly modifying that tech and planning more changes that should help to make this challenge easier. 

In the meantime, we're working on management APIs that will allow you as an admin to have more control over this use case. And while we still don't have a roadmap on when it will be possible to hard-delete a user, we can come pretty close with a very clear and irreversible soft-delete. 

The question we have for you is, do you really want to completely hard-delete a user, never to be able to reference them again, or do you just want them to not be in the way after you've soft-deleted them?

We're also going to address the use case where it's difficult to reinstate an AD user after they've been deactivated from the UI. 

The only other difference between a theoretical hard-delete and a good soft-delete should be disk space. Are you experiencing disk space problems? Anything else that we missed?

We acknowledge and apologize for your frustration and appreciate your patience as we work this out. 

[mzomparelli]

@JohnPelletier yes, I think I can speak for all of us here when I say we do want the ability to fully hard-delete. It's easy enough to recreate a deleted account and if we do then shame on us as the admins of our own server and no shame on Alteryx.

It's not a disk space issue. Why should I have an account for a user that does not even work at my company anymore. Need to be able to delete users for the purpose of keeping the system neat and tidy. Which is not easy in your system.

[mzomparelli]

@JohnPelletier 

I also agree that users should not get a studio by default. In fact let's just get away from studios and collections and just use folders and user groups. It would be nice to be able to apply permissions at the folder level as well as the workflow level if needed. A good example of how this should work you can look at any operating system or take a look at how Tableau Server is doing things. Collections aren't that bad. I do like that the same workflow can be placed in multiple collections without actually copying the workflow. The same could work with folders too if folders just contain links to workflows.

[mzomparelli]

@JohnPelletier  one more thing, I can't even use workflow events on server because workflow events don't support authenticated SMTP. How is this even possible? People stopped using unauthenticated SMTP before Alteryx was even an idea.

[JohnPelletier]

 @mzomparelli 

So in an upcoming release we intend (no promises implied) to have the ability to remove all PII about a user, while still keeping the user record around.  Here's what the new delete is intended to do:

- set role to NoAccess

- set all user permissions to false

- set active to false

- one-way hash the email address to make it unrecoverable

- change the user name to "DELETED USER"

So then you will have no idea who that user ever was. They are erased. And if that user comes back there will be no conflicts in creating a brand new user record for them.

With regard to user groups/folders...we're aiming for a very similar model going forward with user groups and collections. You mentioned that you like the collections so it sounds like the best of both worlds for you.

Not sure what about SMTP is unauthenticated. Which version of Designer are you using? I'm the Server PM, but I can tell you that there are options for authenticated SMTP in the later versions of Designer. I believe it was 19.3, so... 22 months ago? Sounds like you're due for an upgrade. 

Thanks for the input! Have a great weekend.

[JanLaznicka]

Any update on this functionality? Thanks 🙂

[JohnPelletier]

@JanLaznicka  on which part? The ability to delete users as described above? Definitely in the near-term roadmap as an API endpoint, and I should have some more news about it within a few months.

[JanLaznicka]

Exactly, the user deletion. Thanks for the information :).

[JohnPelletier]

Jan, we have a beta program for our new management API. Would you like to participate?

[JanLaznicka]

Hi John, that would be great!