When someone moves to another team or leaves the company, changing or removing their workspace role is often the first task that comes to mind. Document operations, however, leave other paths behind. A teammate’s access to folders and documents, responsibility for maintaining those documents, and the links already held by customers or partners are separate concerns.
That means the unit of offboarding is not one account. It is the group of access and distribution paths affected by a person’s departure. Instead of assuming everything will be revoked automatically, use a runbook that identifies each path and records its new owner and disposition.
Assign a new owner before the change date
Do not record only the departing teammate and their last day. List the folders, documents, recurring distributions, and external inquiries they handled, then name the person who will take each one over. If you remove a member before assigning ownership, the documents may remain while the team loses practical knowledge of where they live and how their sharing settings are managed.
FeatPaper distinguishes space roles for administrators and members from viewer and editor access to folders. If an important folder was shared only with the departing member, confirm that another administrator or editor can manage it before removing the member. The objective is not to assume that every permission transfers automatically. It is to verify that the new owner can find the document and change the settings required for the job.
Separate workspace roles, folder access, and document responsibility
A single “account removed” checkbox hides too much. Break internal access into three records:
- Space role: did the person perform administrator-only work such as member management?
- Folder access: which folders could the person view or edit?
- Document responsibility: who will maintain versions, sharing settings, and responses?
Documents follow the permissions of their folders, so treat a folder move as an access change. Check who will gain access in the destination folder. Record the operational owner separately as well. A product permission name and the team’s business responsibility are not always the same thing.
Review external links on a separate list
Removing a member removes that person’s workspace access, but it does not delete the folders, documents, sharing links, or accumulated viewing data. Links that have already been distributed may also remain available. Internal offboarding and the end of external distribution are therefore not the same action.
For every external link, record the document, recipient group, distribution purpose, current owner, review date, and closing condition. Then choose one outcome:
- Keep: the material and audience remain valid, and the new owner takes over.
- Close: the review has ended or the link is no longer needed, so an authorized person checks and disables it.
- Reissue: the audience or access conditions have changed, so a new link is created and the old link receives a separate closing decision.
“Reclaiming external links” here does not mean an automatic product action. It means finding the relevant links, checking their actual sharing state, and having a person close or reissue them. It also does not recall files that recipients have already saved elsewhere.
Use two perspectives for the final check
The person executing the administrative change and the person taking over the work need different checks. An administrator verifies the role change, member removal, and folder access. The new owner confirms that they can open the documents, maintain versions, update sharing settings, and receive the relevant external questions. Where necessary, define a safe test for external link status.
Do not leave only “done” in the runbook. Record the path, chosen action, executor, verifier, verification time, exceptions, and follow-up date. Do not assume that an already-open session reflects a permission change immediately or claim that every session was forcibly terminated.
Finish when the remaining paths can be explained
Good offboarding is not simply the fastest account deletion. It leaves the team able to explain who owns each document, how internal folder access differs from external distribution, and why each path was kept or closed.
Before the next personnel change, review one recent transition in reverse. If roles, folders, document responsibility, and external links do not connect in one record, that gap is the first item for your offboarding runbook.
