Removing users and groups

Depending on circumstances, you might want to remove users or groups from your WebSphere® Portal Express® that are no longer used or required. You can use the XML configuration interface to list such users and groups. You also have the option to remove only selected some users and groups, and keep others for further use.

1. Make a backup copy of your portal database.
2. To identify and list these users and groups, run an XML export and use the cleanup-users attribute.

   Specify the cleanup-users attribute with the request tag of type export, and set its value to true . You also need to set the export-users attribute to true.

   The resulting output file lists the affected users and groups with their action set to delete.

   The XML sample file CleanupUsers.xml shows an example of how you can export such users and groups.

3. Check the output file from the previous step and remove all users and groups that you want to keep in the portal. For example, you might want to keep the muted users and re-enable their passwords.
   Note: If the number of invalid users is very high, the XML export step can fail with an out-of-memory exception. For such cases, APAR PI23109 introduces a new XML element threshold. In case of such out-of-memory exceptions, add threshold="10000" to the <request ... > element in the CleanupUsers.xml script. This option limits the number of exported users to 10,000. When you use this approach, repeat the export step and all following steps until the exported file contains no entries any more. You need to have APAR PI23109 or fix pack CF14 installed to use this XML element.
4. Import the modified XML file into your portal. The portal removes all users and groups that you left in the XML file during the previous step.