Large installations collect organizations that nobody uses anymore. Working out which ones are truly unused is hard. Changes are spread across scorecard items, initiatives, dashboards, reports, and more, and an organization that looks untouched may still be showing up-to-date data from somewhere else.

The “Stale Organization Quarantine” screen does that work for you. It finds organizations where nothing has changed since a date you choose, and it lets you move them under a quarantine organization. Nothing is deleted, so you can set organizations aside, wait to see whether anyone misses them, and decide what to do later.

You need the Application Administration permission to use this screen.

Choosing a Quarantine Organization

Start by creating an ordinary organization to hold the organizations you set aside, for example one called “Quarantine”. Cascading permissions follow the organization tree. People who could see an organization through its old parent may lose that access once it moves under the quarantine organization, and people who can see the quarantine organization may gain it. Put the quarantine organization somewhere that only the right people can see.

Finding Stale Organizations

In Administration, under “Advanced”, click “Stale Organization Quarantine”. Click the button next to “Quarantine Organization” and choose the organization you created. Next, choose a “Not modified since” date. It starts out as one year ago. Then click “Scan”.

Spider Impact lists each organization where nothing in it, or in any organization beneath it, has changed since that date. Moving an organization moves everything beneath it. So when an organization and all of its descendants are stale, only the top organization is listed, with the number of “Descendant Organizations” beneath it. Each row also counts the scorecard items, initiative items, dashboards, strategy maps, charts, reports, briefings, datasets, files, Forms, and Apps in that part of the tree, and shows when anything in it was “Last Modified On”. Click a column heading to sort by it.

Scanning a large installation can take a while. You can leave the page and come back, and the results will be there when the scan finishes. When there are more stale organizations than the screen can list, it shows the first ones and says so. To narrow the list, choose an earlier date.

What Counts as a Change

An organization counts as active if anything it owns has been changed since the date, such as a scorecard item, initiative, dashboard, report, dataset, or file. It also counts as active if the organization itself was renamed or moved. Finally, it counts as active if one of its dashboards, strategy maps, charts, reports, or briefings shows recently changed data from another organization.

Only changes count. An organization that people look at often but never change can still be listed, so review the list before you move anything. The scan only lists organizations you have permission to view, and it never lists the quarantine organization, anything beneath it, or any organization above it.

Moving and Restoring Organizations

Click “Move” on any row to move that organization under the quarantine organization. The row stays in the list with an “Undo” button that puts the organization back where it was. Each move is also recorded in audit history.

Some organizations can't be moved from this screen, because moving them could cause problems elsewhere. These include a top-level organization, an organization that's part of a template or copy relationship, and an organization involved in replication. When you click “Move” on one of these, Spider Impact explains why. You can still move it yourself in the organization tree if you understand the consequences.

A good rhythm is to quarantine organizations, wait a month, and then delete them if nobody has asked for them back.