Secure decommissioning for Managed Users
This section provides guidance for administrators of Professional groups with Managed Users on how to securely decommission subscriptions, offboard users, and execute final data retention procedures.
Overleaf Professional groups with Managed Users offer administrators control over user accounts and projects when accounts are deleted. If you decide to decommission your Overleaf Professional group with Managed Users, following the procedures described here can ensure that your organization maintains full control over its data and access rights during offboarding.
Overview of the Offboarding Process
Secure decommissioning of an Overleaf Professional group with managed users is conducted in three phases:
User Offboarding and Data Consolidation: Revoking user access while consolidating or releasing managed accounts.
Data Extraction and Retention: Exporting required projects to your organization's secure local or cloud storage.
Subscription Termination: Working with Overleaf Support to securely terminate the subscription and final administrative accounts.
Phase 1: User Offboarding and Data Consolidation
When decommissioning a group—or offboarding individual users—Group Administrators must first revoke access and secure the associated intellectual property. Overleaf provides two mechanisms for managing user accounts during this phase: Deleting or Removing.
Option A: Deleting User Accounts and Transferring Projects
To securely retain organizational data while terminating a user's access, administrators can delete the managed user's account and transfer all of their projects to another designated account (e.g., a centralized administrator or designated user account).
Account deletion securely strips the departing user of all access while preventing data loss or "orphaned" projects. All source code, histories, and assets are preserved under the organization's control.
Navigate to your Subscription page and "manage group members," locate the user, and select the option to delete the account. You will be prompted to specify the email address of the account that should inherit the user's projects.
Option B: Releasing User Accounts
If the organization does not need to retain the data, or if the user is authorized to keep their account and projects outside of the organization's managed environment, administrators can choose to release the account.
Account release removes the user from the organization's managed group and billing subscription, reverting them to an independent Overleaf account.
Navigate to your Subscription page and "manage group members," locate the user, and select the option to release the account.
Once released, the organization no longer has administrative control over that account or its projects. Ensure this aligns with your organization's data security policies before proceeding.
See also: Managed Users.
Phase 2: Data Extraction and Retention
Prior to the final termination of a Professional Group subscription, administrators must ensure that all critical research, documentation, and files are securely exported to meet internal data retention and compliance requirements.
Once all required projects have been consolidated into a designated administrator account (via Phase 1), you can extract your project data directly from Overleaf.
Log in to the consolidation account where the projects currently reside.
For each necessary project, utilize the Download function to export the project source files. You can also bulk download sets of projects.
These actions will generate a .zip archive containing all LaTeX source files, images, bib files, and project assets.
See also: Downloading a project.
Phase 3: Subscription Termination and Admin Cleanup
Overleaf ensures that the final decommissioning of your organizational environment is handled securely. Group Administrators cannot independently delete the overarching Professional Group subscription or self-terminate the final group administrator accounts.
To execute the final closure of your tenant:
Ensure Phase 1 and Phase 2 are complete. Verify that all users have been successfully offboarded, deleted, or released, and that all necessary project .zip files have been securely downloaded to your local systems.
Submit a decommissioning request to the Overleaf Support Team.
Overleaf Support will process the termination of your Professional Group subscription, execute the final clean-up of the remaining administrator accounts, and ensure the subscription is decommissioned in accordance with secure operational procedures.
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