Employees leave the University for many different reasons. If a person whose time you manage leaves, you need to consider the timing of the employee's account closure; determine what will happen to their documents and files; and plan for rerouting communications so that the transition will proceed smoothly. This guide provides information on these topics and more, and refers you to supporting documentation for the best solutions.
Closure Cycles
- Account Closure: The normal account closure cycle takes 45 days. During this process, your former employee will lose account services in two phases during the 45-day period.
- Quick Closure: When an employee departure is due to involuntary termination or the employee has access to sensitive information that needs to be removed immediately, you may request a Quick Closure. Quick Closures speeds the closure process quite significantly; most services can be locked the day the Quick Closure is requested. Please note that active sessions for single sign on and other session-based access are not removed, so an account holder may have access for several hours after other services have been locked. Additionally, staff members who are also active students are not candidates for Quick Closure. Staff who are alumni may be Quick Closed, but will maintain their alumni services (email forwarding and wireless access). Your human resources representative can assist you with your request.
Alert: Neither the account closure nor the quick closure process removes access to every resource the employee accesses or for which the individual is responsible. The regular account closure process continues to provide the former employee with most account services until 45 days after the employee has left the University. After closure has completed, the CNetID and authentication services remain open. It is the responsibility of the manager to ensure that access into local systems are managed appropriately during and after closure.
Reroute Business-Related Emails
If the employee is the primary email recipient for a service you manage, when possible:
- Set up a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox or mailing list address so that the flow of business email is not interrupted during times of turnover. Shared mailboxes provide a public address that is shared among multiple staff members so communications can be maintained even when you have staff turnover.
- Set up an auto reply. Setting up an email auto reply will alert correspondents that the employee has departed and can provide an updated contact for business-related email. Working with your employee to set up a comprehensive auto reply will help ensure that your business workflow will incur minimum disruptions. Do remember that the auto reply only lasts while the CNetID account is open. Your employee can create an auto reply through the MyAccount portal at myaccount.uchicago.edu.
Alert: Quick Closure does not close the employee's email account immediately--it simply removes the employee's ability to access the email account. If the employee has set email forwarding, Quick Closure will remove forwarding set to a non-University address, but will allow forwarding to email services that are within the University (many divisions and schools, including the Booth School of Business, the Biological Sciences Division, and the Physical Sciences Division, have their own email services).
Copy Shared Files
If your former employee owns files in either UChicago G Suite (through Google Drive) or UChicago Box that are shared with you or other members of your team, make sure that the individual makes a copy of the files and saves them to a Team Drive in G Suite or a group folder in UChicago Box. You can request a shared Box folder from IT Services.
Note: Once the former employee’s account closes, these files will be deleted if no action is taken to preserve them.
Department Requires Account Access
Occasionally, you will want to retain access to your employee's email and files after the individual leaves. Please refer to the Procedure to Handle Requests Records or Information for guidance. IT Security can assist you and can be reached at security@uchicago.edu or 773.702.2378. The Security team can help you to determine what sort of access is needed and will work with the Office of Legal Counsel for the appropriate authorization.
Remove Access
Please note that when your employee's account goes through closure, it means that access to certain account services, such as email and file storage, is removed. Services like these are terminated as part of the closure process. However, your former staff member maintains access to their CNetID and password which can be used to authenticate to resources that are not terminated through the 45-day normal account closure or quick closure processes. If you or your department maintains local services to which your former employee has access, you must make sure that your service authorization process is set to remove the former employee, or that employee will retain authentication access to your service.