Delete a board not owned by Administrator


I’ve started to use Miro as a consultant with my clients during virtual workshops regularly. I have changing teams and set ups. When I introduce Miro to my clients I let them play around on, what I call, a jumpstart board. Some clients create their own boards. Now I am stuck with several boards not created by me, most of the boards are empty. The number of boards is starting to pile up under my all boards tab… 

How can I delete a board not owned by me, but created by a client with a guest pass during a session?

 

Thank you.

This is needed so badly, so many blank boards from users trying to learn how to use Miro then trying to get them to get in there and clean up is more work.

 

Should be simple for a Team Admin to be able to Delete any board, or even reassign the owner (then we can reassign to ourselves and delete it anyway).

 

Please resolve this ASAP, it is painful and we are only a small team, couldn’t imagine how much chaos would happen in larger teams.


Adding to this. I find it really frustrating that basic admin control is restricted to the enterprise or consulting plan as small to medium business need these features as well. 

 

We love(ed) Miro and wanted to make it the centre of what we do but after using it for a while you start to realise that it’s incredibly hard to manage and organise Miro. 

 

Our Miro has become a mess and as a result the teams don’t want to use it because it’s just impossible to find anything. To fix this we decided we were going to start the year by cleaning up Miro but now we discover we actually can’t even clean it up. 

 

I’m not sure how the Miro product team envisage this would work in a small business, coordinating everyone in the company to delete or transfer the ownership of all the boards seems is not feasible :(


Hi, howdy, hey!

Big time champion of Miro, and have been using it as well as migrating the rest of my company over to use it as well from other, similar, tools. I’ve been the primary Team Admin for our software for the majority of it’s life at our company, and my peer and I have gone to leadership TWICE in the span of a year to attempt in getting approval for an upgrade to Enterprise all so we can…

DELETE/REMOVE UNUSED BOARDS CREATED BY OTHER TEAM MEMBERS.

We have not gotten approval for this upgrade so the problem still persists. I spent my afternoon combing through this community’s comments regarding this same issue. It’s common sense that bare minimum, regardless of the account tier level, the team admin/admin should be able to remove unused boards. I would be remiss to say that I am disappointed even more to find our company is not the only one facing this issue and Miro’s solution was to make this action exclusive to a very expensive upgrade that is not feasible for all companies and/or users.

And before it is suggested, yes I have created projects to assign to these boards, yes, I have considered this MacGruber-esque workarounds, yes I have engaged with individuals about these unused boards… but it is all so much more work than it could possibly be worth. I really am struggling to continue to champion Miro for our company when the primary solution to this very normal, every-kind-of-user problem, is to upgrade to the highest tier license. 

I truly believe if Miro would GIVE EVERY SINGLE TIER THE ABILITY TO EFFECTIVELY MAINTAIN THEIR TEAM’S DATA HYGIENE AND REMOVE ANY BOARD CREATED BY ANY USER  that the equitable value of Miro would shoot up TREMENDOUSLY and also help pull other admin’s like myself, back from the brink of just biting the bullet and migrating everyone back to a tool we pulled them to Miro from. 

It’s a simple solution. It’s an incredible win for Miro and every user. Most other comparable tools have this basic functionality. It’s 2022, and it may be March but if Miro could make this happen I would consider the Holiday season SEVERAL months early and would not have a single complaint.

Thank you, and I hope to see this improvement.
Jess


To have *any* multi-user paid tier where top-level admins cannot delete other users’ content is crazy. In over 20 years of using SaaS applications, I cannot think of any other product that has done this. This is usually an MVP feature.

My 15-user Business account has more “Untitled” and “My First” boards than it has real ones. The fact that the Business tier includes SAML SSO but no baseline content management features for admins is beyond weird. The only thing weirder is seeing a product manager claim to find this surprising over a period of a year or more.


To have *any* multi-user paid tier where top-level admins cannot delete other users’ content is crazy. In over 20 years of using SaaS applications, I cannot think of any other product that has done this. This is usually an MVP feature.

My 15-user Business account has more “Untitled” and “My First” boards than it has real ones. The fact that the Business tier includes SAML SSO but no baseline content management features for admins is beyond weird. The only thing weirder is seeing a product manager claim to find this surprising over a period of a year or more.


Well said! I appreciate knowing I’m not alone with this issue, but equally sad that it IS still an existing issue. 

I’m really hoping to see something change with this soon, as it would be incredibly unfortunate to have to start looking towards another tool that has this basic functionality available to all. It’s 2022, accessibility, efficiency, and basic data hygiene functions should not need gate keepers.


One strategy Team/Company Admins can employ to reduce the number of boards/projects that all users see is to adjust the default Board and Project sharing settings so that the objects are only visible to the owner/user who created them. Then users can explicitly share the board (or an entire Project) with a subset of users.

More on adjusting the default sharing settings can be found in the Default sharing settings Help Center article: https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017572174


Hi @Kirsten Felbert!

Thank you for sharing your issues! I’d like to elaborate on one aspect.

If a user creates a private board, it won’t be seen by anyone else. You are speaking about cases when your teammates create useless boards while exploring Miro, so can the problem be caused by wrong sharing options? 

A user creating their first “test” board in Miro is by definition not someone who is going to lock down the board’s sharing settings.

Trust me, for each of the 20-30 users who have been part of my Business Plan org, there are one or more (usually more) empty boards called “Untitled” or “My First Board” dominating the All Boards view. It’s an eyesore, and more importantly as Kirsten said, it impacts discoverability of the actual meaningful boards.

Do you folks really not understand the feature request here, or are you playing with us? I have never in my 28 years in the web software development world seen another product that omits “admin can delete anyone’s boards” from any tier for teams.

The Business Plan (which is $20/month per user, minimum 15 users = $3600 and up per month) includes SAML integration, but “admin can delete stuff” is reserved for Enterprise? Come on.


Two Years.

Two years! Astonishing, really.


@Steve Koppelman - If you (or anyone else reading this) did not already know, a Company/Team Admin can set a team’s default board & project sharing settings so that all boards/projects created (after the settings are enabled) will be private, i.e., only visible to the user who created them. From there, the owner would have to chose who they share the content with. I always recommend this configuration as a way to keep things a little less cluttered.

Also, any team member with edit access to a board can change a board’s Team share settings to “No access”, to hide junk boards from view for all users.

More on all of this in my earlier reply to this post:

https://community.miro.com/ideas/delete-a-board-not-owned-by-administrator-352/index2.html?postid=1036#post1036


@Steve Koppelman - If you (or anyone else reading this) did not already know, a Company/Team Admin can set a team’s default board & project sharing settings so that all boards/projects created (after the settings are enabled) will be private, i.e., only visible to the user who created them. From there, the owner would have to chose who they share the content with. I always recommend this configuration as a way to keep things a little less cluttered.

Also, any team member with edit access to a board can change a board’s Team share settings to “No access”, to hide junk boards from view for all users.

More on all of this in my earlier reply to this post:

https://community.miro.com/ideas/delete-a-board-not-owned-by-administrator-352/index2.html?postid=1036#post1036

This is not a solution, only an excuse for not dealing with the real issue, the solution is not to hide junk boards it’s to give team admins propper rights and functionality.


@Steve Koppelman - If you (or anyone else reading this) did not already know, a Company/Team Admin can set a team’s default board & project sharing settings so that all boards/projects created (after the settings are enabled) will be private, i.e., only visible to the user who created them. From there, the owner would have to chose who they share the content with. I always recommend this configuration as a way to keep things a little less cluttered.

Also, any team member with edit access to a board can change a board’s Team share settings to “No access”, to hide junk boards from view for all users.

More on all of this in my earlier reply to this post:

https://community.miro.com/ideas/delete-a-board-not-owned-by-administrator-352/index2.html?postid=1036#post1036

This is not a solution, only an excuse for not dealing with the real issue, the solution is not to hide junk boards it’s to give team admins propper rights and functionality.

I never claimed this to be a solution to the feature being requested in this post. My reply was directed to @Steve Koppelman and was to share information with Steve after he wrote:

A user creating their first “test” board in Miro is by definition not someone who is going to lock down the board’s sharing settings.

Trust me, for each of the 20-30 users who have been part of my Business Plan org, there are one or more (usually more) empty boards called “Untitled” or “My First Board” dominating the All Boards view. It’s an eyesore, and more importantly as Kirsten said, it impacts discoverability of the actual meaningful boards.

I took the following two concerns from Steve’s reply:

  1. Users themselves are not going to make boards private
  2. there are usually 20-30 useless boards visible to everyone.

Following the information in my reply, both points above would not be an issue.


@Steve Koppelman - ... a Company/Team Admin can set a team’s default board & project sharing settings so that all boards/projects created (after the settings are enabled) will be private, i.e., only visible to the user who created them. From there, the owner would have to chose who they share the content with. I always recommend this configuration as a way to keep things a little less cluttered.

Also, any team member with edit access to a board can change a board’s Team share settings to “No access”, to hide junk boards from view for all users.

This is not a solution, only an excuse for not dealing with the real issue, the solution is not to hide junk boards it’s to give team admins propper rights and functionality.

You’re both right!

@Robert Johnson, thanks for the tl;dr summary of your workaround. I can already feel my blood pressure going down a few points. 😊

@Mikael Holmqvist, I agree, it’s an ugly workaround that still leaves other board management issues unsolved.

Leaving out admin permissions for account admins is a weird flex for a $20USD/month per user product tier, but you do you, Miro Product Leads.

 


This is must have! A Team Admin should be able to manage everything for the team.


My workaround: I created a Project named “Trash”…. Then I move all unwanted boards.


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.

This right here is an example of product features being dictated by a low-level piece of the data model instead of by product requirements and use cases.

If I understand this correctly, Miro won’t align their product with 30 years of multiuser client-server UX convention in which a document created by a user in the context of a “team” “shared drive” is

  • owned by the user that created it (or whoever it was transferred to),
  • shareable based on some combination of the discretion of the user and implicit permissions from the location it is placed in
  • always, even if it’s in the “home directory” provided by their organization, fully manageable by the organization’s designated admin groups

This is what I see when I sign in:

In the upper left corner, UX conventions going back to the days of dumb terminals tell me that I am currently working in the context of the team on the upper left. The view I am in is of all boards I can see by the team. The big blue blob at the start of the document list is New Board.

Everything I have learned since the days of floppies, every widely-used document-oriented app I’ve ever encountered, tells me that by clicking that “New Board” button, the thing I am creating is being created in the context of the team on the upper left, and further, as a board not necessarily contained in a specific project at that moment.

There is a bit of ambiguity about default sharing settings here -- and that’s fine as long as it’s predictable, or even better, explicitly labelled once inside the new document. And that’s how Miro works, no serious problem there.

But there is nothing here that is unclear at all on the matter of ownership of that new document. It is a document being created in the context of the team, and therefore, under the purview and ultimate control and ownership of the team’s administrators.

If the left sidebar’s list of team contexts included one representing “my files as a personal accountholder using the same login” because I’m a consultant or external guest of one or more teams, and that context were selected, and the upper left dropdown indicated I was looking at my personal non-work files, then I would expect that the team and org admins don’t have access to the file, if the org policies even allowed such a thing.

By this reasoning, an “unshared” document created by someone who is only a Miro user in the context of one or more teams is directly analogous to a file in a user’s “personal folder” in a department-level shared network volume.

But hey, you do you :) 

 


If files were in personal folders it wouldn’t be so bad. We have this issue currently where I would like to do some housekeeping and cannot. Peoples ‘personal’ boards are polluting and cluttering our team space and it is a bit of a mess, especially when as mentioned half of them are blank and abandoned. My only option is to spend hours contacting the relevant people and chasing them until they tidy up, which will not happen.

We really need some way to control this as it really diminishes the value of the tool when you can’t find what you’re looking for!


If files were in personal folders it wouldn’t be so bad. We have this issue currently where I would like to do some housekeeping and cannot. Peoples ‘personal’ boards are polluting and cluttering our team space and it is a bit of a mess, especially when as mentioned half of them are blank and abandoned. My only option is to spend hours contacting the relevant people and chasing them until they tidy up, which will not happen.

We really need some way to control this as it really diminishes the value of the tool when you can’t find what you’re looking for!

@Lucinda - While not a solution, have you set the default sharing settings for new boards and projects to only be visible to the owner? At least moving forward new boards will not be visible to the entire team.


That’s a good idea for moving forward, at least!


I also want this feature for admins 😍 it’s frustrating to not be able to delete bord as administrators !

It should be available in the business plan as well !