What follows is the checklist for what needs to be done on employee machines before they leave the Institute to help facilitate transitions between old and new employees.
As always, if you're not confident or sure how to do this yourself, please please PLEASE contact us. It is absolutely critical that these things be done correctly and while the user with all the passwords is still working here or there will be delays in processing the data for the new employee.
One week before departure up until the penultimate day:
- Move all folders and emails in your Exchange account (username@mit.edu or username@exchange.mit.edu) to the local "On My Mac" section on the left column list. All emails placed on "On My Mac" are local to the machine and will enable us to easily migrate these emails from your Mac account to the new employee's account. This means that they're no longer in your Exchange email and only on the Mac. Their presence in this location makes it easy for us to grab the folders and emails and copy them to a new user account and set up in the new employee's email.
- Create a folder on your Mac's Desktop called "Files To New Employee" and put any and all files/or folders you would like your replacement to have into that folder.
- Document for the new employee all steps to any programs you use, especially to server volumes and databases.
On the LAST DAY:
- Write all usernames and passwords on paper for your computer account access, database access, and email access. Give a copy of this list of passwords to your supervisor as well as the new employee. These passwords will be critical in maintaining key chains on the Mac account if this is desired. There are some instances where you don't want to do this especially if the keychains are tied to an MIT Kerberos account that will eventually be expired.
- Run a final backup of your machine if you're using Time Machine or Windows Backup.
On the new employee's First Day:
- Create the new user's computer account (if the new user is a temp, we may be asked not to create a new user account).
- If an account is created for the new user, they can keep using the old user account.
- Obtain Certificates for the new user.
- If a new user account is created, copy all files on the old desktop in "Files To New Employee" to the new user account of the new employee.
- If a new user account is created, copy all the email folders from the old Apple Mail account to the new user's email account folder in the user account "Library/Mai/V2/Mailboxes/" folder.
- Launch Apple Mail in the new user's account to build the index from the old emails. After it does this, add the new user's email account.