Delete a board not owned by Administrator

We’re facing the same issue with a 70+ group of (new) Miro user that all (automatically) created a “my first board”-board and now its a mess.Unfortunately I, as company admin, am not even able to clean it  (or move the boards to a certain folder) before kicking-off our Bootcamp. 

Would be nice adding this feature or have a sort of auto function to clean up all the “my first board” actions from newly subscribed users.

Please allow the company administrator to take control of any board created in any of our teams. We are drowning in them on the consultant plan. 

While we all wait for a solution, here are a few strategies you can implement in order to reduce the number of boards seen by everyone.

1) Set the default board sharing settings to → Only board owners can access

With this setting in place, when a new board is created, only the board  creator, i.e., owner, will see the board. If they need others to collaborate with them on a board, they’ll have to learn more about the Share settings in Miro. The same goes with default Project settings - more on both of these in the following Help Center articles:

• Default Sharing Settings
• Sharing Boards and Inviting Collaborators

2) Change the old/junk/useless board’s Share settings to: Anyone at [TEAM NAME] team → No access
Even if you are not the board owner, you can change a board’s Share setting to: Anyone at [TEAM NAME] team → No access

NOTE: If you do this, the board will disappear from everyone’s view, except for the board owner (therefore you will not be able to see it either). So, before you do this, I would recommend that you do as @Kiron Bondale mentioned and create a “trash can” or “hidden” project, making sure that you set the project’s setting of Anyone in your team can view this project → OFF. Then, add the junk boards to this project, and finally set the board’s Share settings of all boards in that project to: Anyone at [TEAM NAME] team → No access. With this strategy in place, only you and board owner will see the boards in your All boards view, and only you will see the trash can project. Now you are able to access these boards and are shielding the rest of the team from having to see them all. Finally, once there is an option for admin’s to delete boards, hopefully you can do this right from with your “trash can” project. 

Adding my two cents:

I am a teacher and my boards are shared with the students. On my personal (free) account. One of my students managed to duplicate a board, which moved my oldest board (in active use) to “view-only” because of the limitations of the free account. And I can’t delete the board he created. I find it very odd that on my personal account another user can create boards that I can’t remove. It looks like a major loophole to me that enables third parties who obtain the link to the board to hijack it. I am going to try the solution where I delete the user and see if it reverts the ownership to me, but I think we all agree here that this is a risk that needs to be addressed.

@Celesta:

It looks like a major loophole to me that enables third parties who obtain the link to the board to hijack it.

Only team members you add to you Free Plan can access boards in your Free Team account. As you mentioned, if you delete this student/member from your Free Plan team, you will be able to specific yourself as the new board owner and then delete the board. Furthermore, there is no public guest editor access in the free plan, so where someone may be view the board if Anyone with the link is set to Can view, they will never be able to edit/duplicate/delete it.

Education Plan

By the way, if you are a teacher of students at an accredited education institute, you can apply for a free-for-life, 100 member, Education Plan team.

If you do apply for the Education Plan, you may want to review these helpful managing the default project and board access permissions.

• Educational Plan - Manage Project level access
• The Projects Miro Help Center article - has a good explanation on the Team → Projects →  Boards permissions hierarchy
• Education Plan Help Center article

Thank you, Robert. I am waiting for my school to submit the documentation for the Education Plan.

Regarding team access: I actually wonder if there is another loophole or even a bug that is being in play here. I invited my students to the board by simply giving them the link. I don’t see why an uninvited third party won’t be able to join if they get hold of the link. Is there something I am missing?

I have to give students Edit rights because they work on the board.

I wonder if “editing the contents” and “editing the board” rights can be separated: for students to be able to Edit the contents but not delete or duplicate the board. Similar to Google documents in the clouds, which, to the best of my knowledge, can be shared for editing the contents, but the editors won’t be able to delete the file for all other users. Maybe I am wrong?

@Celesta - You cannot invite user at the board level only with the Free Plan. Regardless of the way you invited them to the board, they requested approval and were added at the team level.

A few things you will want to check:

Team Permissions

From your dashboard, click on the team settings/gear icon:

Permissions - you may want to ensure the following are set:

Team “Member” vs “Team Admin”

Then make sure you are the only Team Admin, otherwise any admin could remove ALL members from the team and then you’d be locked out of it.

@Celesta:

I wonder if “editing the contents” and “editing the board” rights can be separated: for students to be able to Edit the contents but not delete or duplicate the board. 

The permissions are limited on the Free Plan. Any Free Plan team member can

• see all boards in the plan
• duplicate any board
• create new boards

The only thing you can do to stop another team member from editing content on a board is to set its share settings to Team access to the board → Can view. Now only the board owner can edit the board and change its Team settings back to Can edit.

Also, only board owners can delete a board, as you have found out.

Yes, we need this, also for projects. I don’t want to leave projects, sometimes I want to delete them. Clean up the environment. 

We have a paid subscription. Currently people are getting acquainted with Miro. As such, they create a lot of test boards etc. Currently I'm in the middle of the cumbersome process of asking them to clean up / delete the boards when not used anymore. It would be most helpful if administrators could delete it for them.

Hi there. I, too, find it very odd that there is still no option for administrators to delete boards that others created. It is simply not suitable for an organized work process that each and everyone can do whatever he or she wants in the workspace - if only by accident - without anyone else having the option of cleaning up afterwards. This is the first software I see in this context that basically lets administrators invite people but afterwards strips them of essential rights to actually administrate what is happening in the workspace.

We have an educational version of Miro, and students are enjoying the package, but I have exactly the same problem of being unable to delete unwanted boards, which students created while they were playing around in Miro.  I’ve tried creating a Trash project, but the boards still show up on All Boards, and I don’t want to move the other boards into Projects, as I would have to change their navigation instructions, which would create problems.  It would be incredibly helpful if administrators could delete unwanted boards in Miro

It should go without saying that Admins should have administrator permissions for their account, irrespective of the plan.  The ability to delete superfluous boards and projects should be core functionality (for an Admin user).

This is very needed. As a Team Admin I also wish I could clean up a lot of boards that are either empty or unused for several months. The same for shared templates.

If as an Admin I'm able to remove an user, I should also have the power to delete whatever I want to keep the Teams clean and organised.

I was surprised as an admin that I wasnt able to do this sort of housekeeping. One of my teams now has 40+ “My first boards” that I dont seem to be able to deal with. I realise I could email out to everyone involved to ask them to sort out their board, but this seems rather a big detour to what should be a simple thing.

It is incredible that this simple team workspace management feature is still not available.

YES!!!

Have education plan. Would be great to be able to delete blank boards started by students without asking them to delete themselves. I dont want to remove them from the account just yet because I want them to be able to come back to their work if they want. Just allowing the admin to delete whatever they want seems to be the best solution. Isnt that the point of an admin?

Another example here. I also want to clean the boards of my manager. I cannot force him to delete boards (since his time is limited) or I cannot delete his account. Having this feature on Free Plan will be great for this use case. @Anton Telitsyn I guess this one is not rare enough to discard. Being able to clean team’s boards can be “favourite miro feature” for many of miro users in my opinion. 

Hey @Deniz Kaplan! Miro treats all content created by a user as owned by them while they stay in the account. The only exception is for Enterprise plan where a company admin can be granted with content admin permissions. In that case, the admin can manage boards, but all such actions are logged for security reasons. Sorry, it is not something that we consider for free plan.

Got that, I just want to share my real life use case for my company need. The cases we mentioned are real life examples but it is your decision at the end. Thanks for paying attention.

Hello,

I’m having a related problem. In the “business” plan I’m an admin. One of my team members left and I deleted her as a user but did not opt for deleting all her boards but to transfer them to Team Admins. Which Im 1 of (we are 2).

However, I’m still not able to delete any of her boards. Which I understood from earlier conversations here would be possible. I should have deleted all her boards? 

How can I can proceed to avoid boards piling up that are not used anymore? Isn’t that why we are an admin?

Thanks

Sarah

I am admin of team and regularly found some temporary and empty Untitled board. As admin I just want to delete them without bothering every owner of this trashy boards.

@Pavel Zhovner - Since you are the team admin, one change I would suggest that you make is to change the default board and project sharing settings so that only the creator can see them. This will avoid everyone’s having to see stuff that don’t want/need to.

Here’s a post where I described this strategy and a few of its benefits:

https://community.miro.com/peer-support-45/control-about-boards-who-can-see-them-3660?postid=15246#post15246

We would be happy with at least allowing renaming and moving of boards to keep it structured in a scaling team.

Nonetheless, “deleting” would be a nice add on. ;)