I have a situation that I am trying to navigate through. A person resigned from a position (nothing negative) still working within the same “umbrella” but in a different project focus. Another person was added to take over the responsibilities. Then came the issues of email access. For purpose of discussion, I will just call it “office” or “finance” for easy tracking instead of “project a or b” along with basic names.
Jack has access to office@mydomain [dot] com
Jack resigns
Jill takes over office@mydomain [dot] com
Jill is learning the process (and still getting some training from Jack)
Jack can’t find certain emails to help with the training and keeps having to reset the password
Jill does the exact same thing.
Both now accuse each other that they are sabotaging the other.
I tried going through the Google Suite Admin Reports but it doesn’t show me a folder being deleted, I just see IPs logging in, but can’t see what the IP did.
Now, I learned my lesson and wanted to establish better protocols for everyone. For those who have experience in email user account management. What is the typical standard for department emails and people assigned to those departments?
We have this kind of personnel shift fairly frequently in my company because of our project-based work. Therefore, we consider email to be ephemeral. There is no expectation that emails will be available later or from the person who did the job before. We require everything important to be recorded in minutes of meeting, decision registers, or some other kind of document that is available in the project records.
To solve the immediate problem, no one is allowed to reset the password effective immediately
Email addresses that aren’t tied to a person should be a distribution list that forwards to a person or persons. Alternatively a “parent” account which is not accessible by the users who read from it, but do so by way of auto-forwarding all email to those users. For outgoing emails, authorised users can send still send outgoing email from that account with some special configuration in the mail client.
It should be possible to migrate the office@domain account to a distribution list to solve the problem now.
What @jahala says also makes a lot of sense. Regulatory bodies or legal department may require data retention, however.
You can also think about using Aliases for users. For example every employee has his/her own email account based on their name. Subsequently you assign an alias to their account (max 30 per user) for their specific function(s) within the organization.
You will have to take care making sure that the role based email can be transferred when employees get new roles assigned.
The collaborative features are very powerful, managed correctly it should ensure no email to the organization will remain unanswered etc etc