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This article highlights several best practices for when a user who's authored content leaves the organization, or for when an author must be reassigned to any given piece of content. For best practices regarding transitioning intranet managers, check out this article! 

Note that by default, all users with edit and publish permissions, including Content managers, can change the content author when the content is published, and while the content is still in draft.

If no one is added to the Protected authors list by an App manager, then anyone with Content management permissions will be able to change the author of content they manage to anyone in the company, including the CEO or non-site members (if the content is held on a public site).

Team member turnover is common. Your intranet users will come and go as your company grows and changes. But what happens to someone's content when that team member leaves the company? 

Their content stays on the intranet. By default, if no action is taken to reassign the authored content, the user's name will appear as the author. If you click their name, you'll be taken to their profile, but see an alert indicating the user is inactive. The same rules apply to blog posts.

Because this isn't ideal for all our customers, we've put together some best practices for transitioning content ownership when an author leaves the company. 

Below, we've given five best practices you can use for reassigning content. You can also bulk update content authors using the Salesforce Developer Console. See below for more information. 

1. As part of their offboarding process, have the author go to their My content (or Manage content if on a newer release) menu and manually go into each piece of content they've created to reassign the author. See our article on Ghostwriting for instructions on reassigning authors.
2. If the user has already left, or cannot complete the above suggestion, have a System admin log in as the user from Salesforce. Go to their My content menu and manually reassign the author of each piece of content.
3. Have an App manager go to the user’s profile. Scroll to the bottom to see their list of published content. Manually go into each piece and reassign the author.
   
4. There's also the option to have a System admin use the Salesforce Data loader to export all the user's content and reassign the author via CSV file. This option is only recommended if the user has authored a lot of content, and it's not realistic to manually reassign the author. 
5. Finally, take no action. If you don't do anything in this situation, the user/author's name will only show when someone is viewing the content. Once the user is removed from Simpplr, they won't be searchable in the database, they won't take up a Salesforce license, and they won't be in the org chart. Their profile information is only kept in the interface because they're a content author. 

Bulk update content authors using the Salesforce Developer Console

When someone leaves the organization, Simpplr will deactivate them as per your SSO/HRIS system settings. However, their content will stay authored by them by default. 

You can use the Salesforce Developer Console to bulk update content authors as needed. To do so, you'll need to:

1. Get the required ID numbers (both the original author and the new author's ID and the site ID)
2. Update the data loader command with the IDs
3. Run the command in the Salesforce Developer console

Paste collected IDs here:

Collect the required IDs

1. First, get the "oldAuthorProfileId". To find this, go to the old author's profile in Simpplr. If the user has been deactivated, go to any piece of content authored by them and click their name to get to the profile.
   
2. The user's ProfileID will be visible as the numbers at the end of the URL on their profile. Copy the string of numbers and paste it in your table or location you can reference later.
   
3. Now, get the "newAuthorProfileId". Navigate to the designated new author's profile and copy the numbers at the end of the URL. This will be the same action as you completed above. Paste the value in your table.
   
4. Get the "siteId". Navigate to the site where the content lives. From the site dashboard, once again, you'll copy the string of numbers at the end of the URL. That is the siteId. Ignore the /dashboard portion after your string of numbers. Paste the value in your table. In our example, the site where the content lives is New Hire Onboarding.
   

Update the data loader command with the IDs

Use the query below to update the command. Copy this code snippet. You'll paste in into the Developer Console as instructed below. Be sure when you paste the code, you replace the highlighted numbers here with the IDs you collected.

String oldAuthorProfileId = 'a0w5e000000p2nVAAQ';

String newAuthorProfileId = 'a0w5e000000WGNcAAO';

String siteId = 'a145e000001JEHWAA4';

List<Simpplr__simpplr_content__c> contentList = [select id, simpplr__primary_author__c

                                                 from simpplr__simpplr_content__c 

                                                 where simpplr__site__c=:siteId

                                                 and simpplr__primary_author__c=:oldAuthorProfileId];

for(Simpplr__simpplr_content__c contentObj : contentList) {

    contentObj.simpplr__primary_author__c = newAuthorProfileId;
}
update contentList;

Paste the command into the Salesforce Developer Console

1. Navigate to this URL, being sure to replace the highlighted portion with your intranet's base URL. https://baseURL.my.salesforce.com/_ui/common/apex/debug/ApexCSIPage
2. Select Debug > Open Execute Anonymous Window.
   
3. Paste the command with your correct IDs into the text editor. 
4. Select Execute at the bottom corner of the text editor.
   
5. The code executes in the background and will not give an indicator of completion. Changes should take effect within five minutes.
6. Be sure to go back to Simpplr to verify the command worked as planned. In our example, the new author, Amber Rich, has taken ownership of every piece of content originally written by Nicole Kramer.