How do I change item owner?
I've imported thousands of items into an app via Excel import. This makes me the "owner" of those items. I'd like to grant others the right to delete those items by either letting anyone delete them or by making somebody else the owner and thus giving a specific person the right to delete them.
How do I do this?
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Official comment
Hi Timo,
Only workspace admins can delete items in an app, so you'd need to make someone an admin if you want them to be able to delete items. Here is a breakdown of member roles in workspaces:
https://help.podio.com/entries/21706903-Admin-and-member-roles
/Jacquelyn - Podio
Comment actions -
Um, according to the page you linked to that is not exactly true:
a regular member that is the app creator can delete both own and others' items in an app.Is this incorrect?
The page does not tell who can delete their own items. Can you please tell me that?
Just to make sure I got this correctly:
There are three factors affecting whether a user can delete items:
- User's role (light / regular / workspace admin)
- Whether or not the user created the app the item is in
- Whether or not the user created the item he wants to delete
Correct?
And, based on the answer, we can modify only one of these after-the-fact: the user's role.
Correct?
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Ok. So here's the summary:
Who can delete an item?
| | Light member | Regular member | Regular member & app creator | Workspace admin |
|------------------------|:------------:|:--------------:|:----------------------------:|:---------------:|
| Didn't create the item | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Created the item | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |It's a real problem that we can't change the item owner. Do you have any suggestion on how we should handle our situation: a CRM with thousands of contacts, imported from Excel, managed by 'round 40 people?
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That does not solve the problem, as I'm sure you understand. That would only work in a situation where only a few members of the workspace should be able to delete items. Or, alternatively, every item is created individually by the real "owner" via Podio. Even in those cases, it's pretty risky having to make people WS admin just to delete items they're the real owners of in the first place.
It being 2014, it's pretty unlikely that Podio is the first data storage for any company. I think you've seen that too, judging by effort you've put into building the import functionality. But once you import, you lose control partially. Quite a shortcoming, if you don't mind me saying. So this is most definitely one for the product development list
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It is definitely something we will consider if we start hearing it more. To be honest it is very rare that we hear this problem, why do you want to delete customers or leads often in the CRM use-case? I would rather update the items with a specific category if they are no longer of interest - but keep them listed in the app for historical reasons.
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More thinking that you used the "key" function to check for duplicates in the first place when you imported all items :) If you already have a long history of leads and duplicates the bulk delete function is best: https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/articles/201019808-Bulk-delete
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Ah, these are not that kind of duplicates. The mechanic checking (i.e. "if this field is exactly the same then these are duplicates") we've done already. We still have a lot of entries that contain data for the same company, but no field is exactly the same (at least not reliably so). Like this: item one is Company Inc. and item two is company Ltd.. They both have references from other apps, which means that somebody has to move those references, merge the other data and then delete one of the original items.
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It could be a good practice simply to mark these duplicates with a category "duplicate" - then the workspace admins will be able to filter easily to find all duplicates on a regular basis. Each member won't need to clean it up but can simply mark it as duplicate for cleaning later.
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Ok. Thanks for trying.
I'm surprised more people haven't run into this limitation of not being able to change item owner.Just as a FYI to others who might be reading this:
as a workaround, we've decided to try and create an automatic API script that will delete anything marked as to be deleted (a field in our app). The script will run whenever an item changes. If the that field value is found, it'll simply delete the item. This will, in effect, be the same as giving everyone who has editing rights also deletion rights – without giving them any of the other workspace admin rights. -
Thanks for the suggestion, Sara. That's exactly what we've done, but it still leaves the task of getting rid of those duplicates without losing any information. And that task is best handled by the people who know the data. That would be the data's real "owners" (i.e. who's responsible for the data currently), not the owners in Podio sense (i.e. who entered or imported the data into Podio).
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Hi Timo,
I think there are similar situations when some posted through an webform or e-mail direct to the app. Then also only admin roles can delete the item. I think your work-around is very nice.
Would you like to share your script with me? Since we have no PM feature I ask you to search on LinkedIn for my name 'Ron van der Plas, The Netherlands' and send me a private message. Thanks in advance. -
Hi Sara, why won't it be possible to change an item's owner? I think it makes sense. The creator and the owner could be different persons, as with everything else in the physical world. As you say, the item creation happened in the past, so that is logged in the item's activity, where the first entry will always say who the creator was. As long as you don't remove that from the activity, you won't be changing the truth. That's what activity logging is for.
We have the same problem as Timo, after a bulk import, all items have the same owner, which can't be changed, even though the actual owner of the item is someone else.
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If you don't want to allow people to change the creator then I think you need a way to mark a contact field in the template as the formal "owner" rather than just having one called owner that has no meaning outside the app. I imported all the contacts from our existing CRM and now in the Activity Stream each item, whenever anyone updates it, says: "Organization ABC; Organization by Roger Hunwicks" when in fact I am nothing to do with the management of that organization, I just did the import. If you won't let people change the creator/owner then you need to let them designate which field is used to generate that descriptive text on the item in the Activity Stream
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Further to my earlier answer... you could add a new item to App Settings, Advanced that is an optional Owner Field that lets the user choose from a select list containing all the fields in the template. Then, if the Owner Field is set in the App Settings and that field is not empty for an object, the comment could read "<Object Name> of <Owner>" instead of "<Object Name> by <Creator>". I think that would solve everyone's problem without requiring any fundamental changes to your data model.
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Ideally, you would extend the permissions model so that if the Owner field is a User then:
- the Owner field can only be changed by the current Owner or a Workspace Admin
- the Owner has the same rights as the Creator - i.e. they are allowed to delete the item
But I think many people would rather have the first solution (an Owner field that alters the comment in the Activity Stream) early rather than wait for the second one.
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Hi guys,
I am now in the exact same situation as @Roger Hunwicks. As the person technically doing all the setup and data importing on a new Podio CRM project, I am now owner all of the data. Not only do I get notified on every change but the owner info in the activity streams is now rather useless. We do have a contact field in every item that holds the actual person being responsible for e.g. a customer. But users do not see this on first glance (as I am the creator) so they always have to go into the item to actual see who really is the responsible person.I would also suggest to have the definition of the "creator" but also the current "owner", being the owner who is shown in all the streams and stuff. As this surely is not a main use case I would promote to make this an API thing, so in cases like ours or Rogers to allow having a script run and change the owner (keeping creator).
I really hope this makes sense and is considered
Regards,
Andreas -
Hi, just wanted to say this request, for having a function to change ownership or add an owner editor, is still very needed. In our latest project were we create about 90% of the items by automation through scripts. The same with items are created by workflows. So we also have a similar situation where the item owner icon does not represent the person who is really responsible for the content of the item.
Would be nice to have a solution at some time.
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