Automatically enable/disable users based on dates

We would like to see a more automatic way to enable/disable user accounts based on a schedule of some sort (forgive me if this feature is in the Schedule app, I couln’t find it/havent used it yet really).

I usually get an email every week with new starters/leavers and would like a way to setup accounts so that they activate on the day someone starts and deactivate the day someone leaves (unless I leave it empty ofcourse).

Is this something that is being thought about?
It’s also a question from Management as obviously they dont want to have a situation where someone forgets and we pay for a user that is no longer needed.

2 Likes

Hey @Ricardo_Musch—thanks for the post and welcome to the community!

A couple quick forum housekeeping notes before the discussion continues. :slight_smile:

I made a small tweak to your post by editing the title and applying a few tags.

This thread has an overview of how feature requests can be submitted directly to our product team via our roadmap portal.

Discussion here and other places is welcome and will be escalated by me and other community Shotgunners, but official requests should be directed to the roadmap portal .

Additionally, if you have feedback on our feature request workflow, we’re soliciting feedback in the thread I mentioned above and will share with the community as we iterate it.

Aiming to have an update on this front in the not-to-distant future. Till then, the roadmap portal is your best avenue for feature requests and the forum for discussion.

I don’t know of a way to do this type of automation in app right now.

I did work at a studio using SG in the past that had something like this. It was an in-house script that ran once a day—checking upcoming assignments (looked at Task and Start Date), ensuring the user’s account was active, and made it so if not.

Anyone else out there have ideas to share?

I guess I could make a script run once a day on the farm and read some custom fields and then decide to do something.

But it would be nice if this was part of the standard way the website works.

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I agree that’d be helpful!

Help us understand the use case a bit more:

  • How would you see the logic for disabling the account working for your studio?
  • Is that something like “check artist’s assigned task, must be past the due date, and status of task is done/finished”?

I think we are overcomplicating.

What I’d like to see is in the people page, two system fields for a user:

Start Date, Stop Date

Shotgun would then automatically figure out that a user account should be “enabled” on the start date and “disabled” on the stop date.

That way I can happily set up new users and know that we won’t be accidentally paying for users that do not work for us anymore.

I know we can do this by hand but it would be a helpfull feature, especially in studios that have lots of freelancers coming in for a week or two.

2 Likes

Hey Ricardo,

This is definitely a case where, as you and johnny discussed, a small cron (or Windows Task Scheduler, depending on your host OS) job linked to a Shotgun API script would easily do the work you’re describing. With two Date fields on the Person (HumanUser) entity, a cron could handle the disabling of users as needed. Additional business logic (are there unfinished Tasks, etc.) could be added in as needed.

I was originally going to suggest the Events Daemon, but that triggers off of EventLogEntry records, and wouldn’t apply here since the date is what’s changing and triggering the work you need done.

Hope that extra bit of detail is helpful (and +1 to everything that @johnny.duguid said about the roadmap portal :slight_smile: )

4 Likes

Hey Ricardo,

Another option might be the SSO integration:

If you’re enabling/disabling your user accounts via your identity provider, they would also automatically update in Shotgun via the integration.

4 Likes

Hi Ricardo,

I think the OOTB solution might be to either use Filters (or Conditional Formatting) and a calendar reminder. For instance, every Monday, have a reminder to look at your people Page.

I’ve created Start/End date Fields on the Person Entity, and a Tab on the People Page, grouped by Status that looks like this:

And the Saved Page Filter looks like this:

55%20PM

Just multi-select each group and flip the statuses.

Cheers,
Matt

9 Likes

Hey Fozzie,

that’s all fine and dandy SSO wise, I’d love to have that but it all comes down to money in the end…
So a simple solution sometimes works best.

1 Like

Hey Matt,

yeah I was thinking about doing such a thing, just think it would be a great addition to “Standard Shotgun”. Also since there are now scheduling apps bundled with Shotgun, this feature would kind of fit into that nicely.

1 Like