Eventually, it is likely that you will have a need to ‘swap’ one of your existing Activ user licences from its existing owner to a new owner – usually because the employee is leaving the company or moving on to a role that will no longer require them to access Activ. Where this is the case, it may be tempting to simply give the existing account to the new employee, and change its key details (i.e. name and email) to theirs, so that they can pick up where the original account owner left off. However, it is recommended that you do not hand over access in this way, as:
- this is bad practice from an Information Security point of view; and
- this will corrupt your system’s audit trails, as all work done by the previous account owner will automatically be updated to state that it was done by the new owner. This is done so that legal name changes are correctly reflected in your audit trails, should they occur. However, Activ is not able to differentiate between an account being updated to reflect a legal name change, and an account being updated because it has been given to someone else.
For these reasons, Activ access ‘transfers’ should ideally be completed using the following process:
- Disable the old user account.
- Create the new user account.
- Re-assign relevant open actions to the new user account. This can be done using the Orphaning tool for key records/actions such as Reviews and open Improvement Logs, and by manually editing the assignee for all other actions.
This will allow you to remove access from the old user, and provide it to the new user, without compromising any of your system’s audit trails.
