Unnecessary groups: Delete or Deactivate?

[eweatherbee_intermatic]

I just inherited a rather messy Workfront setup that has a plethora of user groups setup for a small group of people. It's creating a cacophany of permissions issues and I am tempted to kill all groups and make one parent group for all, especially because we ultimately want everyone to be able to see everything within Workfront. There is no functional reason for us to use this feature, especially for our size. My question is:

Can I just delete these groups entirely, or do I HAVE to deactivate them? What impact would it have from a user perspective to simply delete them and make a new one with everyone on it?

For the record, our setup is so messy that I'm having to re-implement from the ground up, so I'm not really interested in preserving much of the old setup. I'm just wondering if there's a real issue I should be aware of re: deletion versus deactivation.

[AbiBeggs]

Hi, this doesn't exactly answer your question but we're actually rebuilding our group structure right now too.

We've rebuilt everything in one of our sandboxes to test out before removing our current structure - it might be worth looking into for your instance as well!

[Lyndsy-Denk]

I'm also a big fan of testing in sandbox, as @AbiBeggs suggests.

That said, it's not super difficult to:

1. Create a new group.
2. Add users to the new group.
3. Deactivate the old groups.
4. Wait a bit and delete old groups.

This might give a good cushion for discovering hidden reasons for those groups that don't seem apparent to you now. For example, when I started futzing with groups, I discovered downstream consequences because:

• Portfolios and programs were associated with groups
• Projects and templates were associated with groups
• Teams were associated with groups
• Sharing permissions were associated with groups
• [probably more objects I can't recall]

I now have filters in place at these various object levels to audit group alignment. When I need to make group changes, I use the order of operations above as a means to add before removing.