Don't think that you can delete a user. All that you can do is uncheck the "Enable User" box in the bottom of the Edit User dialog. This will disable the user.
It appears that Autodesk does not trust the Admins out in the field to make a responsible decision whether do delete a user or not. The software should also be intelligent enough to know that if a user or group is used and has history, then it cannot be removed.
This is definitely a shortcoming in the software and short sightedness on the part of the Autodesk programmers.
Welcome to the forums... did you have a question? Generally speaking, your first post being a gripe is not very constructive. I understand (believe me!) the frustration with the software's real or perceived shortcomings.... but a more constructive post may be to place a suggestion in the Vault Idea Station: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Vault-IdeaStation/idb-p/2 ...
or here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=1109794
If you have a specific question, there are a number of good people here ready and willing to help. This particular forum section is followed by a number of Vault team members who have gotten me out of a lot of holes in the last few years.
Chris Benner
Inventor Tube & Pipe, Vault Professional
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I'd never thought of renaming. That might help. Not to assign the ID to a new user (I'd prefer not to inherit history) but to maybe help clean up the user list dialog box. Right now, we have almost twice as many inactive users as active. It makes navigating this box a pain.
Perhaps a checkbox to 'Hide inactive users' would be a good compromise? That leaves necessary accounts in place, but doesn't clutter the screen with inactive users.
My major concern is with automatically created accounts and long term maintenance. We currently have many accounts that are read-only and are created with their domain creds (division/username), making renaming somewhat awkward. We are in the midst of trying to clean up and do some organization of our data and it would be a major asset to be able to remove old/unused/redundant accounts and allow these read-only users to establish fresh creds (if they are even still with the company) on their next login.
I truly see and agree with the logic of once a user has even a single record to their name we lose the delete ability but would love to see at least an option of removing reference accounts. To carry it even a step further to allow the removal of any accounts but the history gets reassigned to a system user (division/UserRemovedByAdmin). Technically these records still have the true user name they were created by in the CAD file but the Vault maintenance becomes much easier and adaptive to long term changes.
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