How do I transfer ownership of a doc when the doc owner has left the company and been deleted?

How To
#1

There are a bunch of docs that were created by a team member that has since left the company. I deleted their Google Account and manually deprovisioned them from all of their services (including Coda).

But now I’m running into a situation where:

  • All of their documents are Read Only
  • And even though I’m the account owner / admin, I don’t have the ability to change the document owners.

The instructions in the article How do I change ownership of a document? show the “is owner” option which I presume are only available to the doc creator.

This is a common use-case. For example, Google lets you transfer all of a departing team member’s materials to a new owner as part of their deprovisioning process (see step 6).

None of the other community posts I found address this problem (even though they all allude to this unmet need):

There were two workarounds I tried:

  • Resorting the user in Google wasn’t possible because the restoration time frame had elapsed. I tried creating a new Google user with the same email address, but it was created as a new identity in Coda. I also tried logging in with email / password and requesting a password reset, but the user was only a Google user

  • Copying the files introduced its own issues because many of the docs have crossdoc capabilities integrated that would mess up all of the downstream files (which aren’t easy to identify because there’s no way to determine what other tables depend on this table)

And even if I could copy the documents, I’m unable to delete, move, or rename the old documents so they just sit there in the folder creating clutter and messing with search.

This is a pretty big problem IMO, so any help is appreciated!

#2

Hello @MrChrisRodriguez,

There are two cases to consider here.

  1. Your workspace is backed by Google Drive.
    In this case, Coda has no control over the ACLs and ownership of your docs - you’d need to handle the re-assignment of docs via the G Suite admin dashboard. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1247799?hl=en

  2. Your workspace is backed by Coda.
    In this case, we have a solution which is only available for Enterprise Organizations at the moment. Instructions are available here: https://help.coda.io/en/articles/3836375-transfer-coda-docs-to-a-new-owner

We are aware this is a gap for non-Enterprise workspaces at the moment and are exploring options that do not compromise privacy or security.

-Chris

#3

Thanks for the response @chris

Is it possible for me to revert back from Coda-backed to GDrive-backed so that I can address this?

We’re on the Team tier which is billed as “For team collaboration” so I’m surprised and disappointed that this fundamental team need (every team gains and loses members) is only provided to the non-publicly priced Enterprise tier.

Maybe I’m being naive, but if Google thinks it’s appropriate to transfer documents when a user is deleted, and provides administrators the ability to reassign document ownership in Shared / Team Drives, then shouldn’t that be a sufficiently secure mechanism for Coda as well?

Users have the ability to keep private documents in their personal spaces after all, so anything within a team should fall within the purview of that team’s administrators.

#4

@MrChrisRodriguez,

Until we’re able to bake something into the product for this to make it self-service, please reach out via support so we can review the request and take action manually on our side for now.

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