Awareness Training - Managing Inactive Users

This article describes how to create a group of users to be temporarily excluded from receiving Mimecast Awareness Training notifications, and is intended for Administrators.

This functionality is available for Email Security Cloud Gateway only.

Permanently Disabled Users

Permanently disabled user accounts can be managed with settings in the Mimecast Directory Synchronization connector, where you can Acknowledge Disabled Accounts and Delete Users in the connector configuration.  

Considerations

• Deleting users via Directory Sync will remove them from the Mimecast Internal Directories and Awareness Training. All Awareness Training statistics related to the Deleted Users will be removed.

See LDAP Sync for Active Directory or Azure Directory Synchronization Integrations.

Managing Inactive Users

Configuring Inactive Users for Employees on Leave

An employee doesn't need to receive Mimecast Awareness Training notifications for a period of time (e.g. maternity leave) but their Active Directory account and access to other Mimecast applications must remain. Additionally, notifications sent to their email address are being automatically forwarded to an alias email address (e.g. the person covering for them). 

While the employee is away, they're not watching their Mimecast Awareness Training videos. Leaving their Mimecast Awareness Training account active impacts their Mimecast Awareness Training scoring, due to their lack of participation. Marking their Mimecast Awareness Training as inactive allows you to protect their Mimecast Awareness Training data to date so it can be recovered when they return. 

The solution is to add them to the Mimecast Awareness Training Inactivate User Group but leave them active in other Mimecast applications, and Outlook. Configuring Inactive Users to Remove Alias Address Notifications

Previously, if an employee had both a primary address and one or more alias addresses, and these addresses exist in the Default User Group selected, both addresses would be assigned training, campaigns, and phishing tests. As a result, email notifications were sent to both primary and alias addresses. This changed in October 2020.

All Mimecast Awareness Training notifications are assigned to a user's primary address, not the alias address.

The historic alias email addresses previously included in the Default User Group will still appear in your historic data, but can be hidden by making these alias users inactive, specific to Mimecast Awareness Training by using the Select Inactive User Group option (see below) to select an Active Directory or local group of users. The group selected is excluded from receiving all Mimecast Awareness Training notifications, including training modules, phishing campaigns, and reminders.

Managing Inactive User Group

You can manage the Inactive User Group, by using the following steps:

1. Log in to Mimecast Awareness Training.
2. Navigate to Settings | General Settings menu item.
3. In Select Inactive User Group, click into the Select User Group field.
4. Click on either:

• • Local Groups tab to select a group created in the Mimecast Administration Console. See Managing Groups for more information.
  • Active Directory Groups tab to select a group of users defined in your Active Directory.

5. Select the required Group
6. Click on the Apply group.
7. Click on the Save button in the Select Inactive User Group panel.

Filtering Inactive User Data

All Mimecast Awareness Training tables include a User State column that can be used to identify if an employee is active or inactive. If an employee is a part of the inactive group selected in Settings | General Settings | Select Inactive Users Group, they will be listed as INACTIVE. If an employee is not in this group, they will be listed as ACTIVE.

You can filter the table by active or inactive, by using the following steps:

1. Select a User Details table you wish to filter by.
2. Click on the Filters | Selected dropdown.
3. Select the box next to Active and/or Inactive.
4. Click Apply.

The User State column is only visible if the Exclude Inactive User Data box is not selected in Settings | General Settings | Select Inactive User Group.

Excluding Inactive Users from Mimecast Awareness Training Analytics

By default, all end user data is available in the Awareness Training platform tables and analytics whether they are active or inactive.
You can exclude inactive users' historical data, by using the following steps:

1. Log in to Mimecast Awareness Training.
2. Navigate to Settings | General Settings menu item.
3. In Select Inactive User Group, click into the Select User Group field.
4. Select the Group you would like to exclude from the analytics.
5. Select the Exclude Inactive User Data box.

6. Click on the Save button.

Changing an inactive user group while the Exclude Inactive User Data box is checked will result in a delay of analytics being updated. If a new inactive users group is selected, analytics will update either at 5am or 5pm EST.