When a company or user's membership expires, their access to protected online areas and mailing lists can be deactivated. If the member renews their membership, the account can simply be reactivated, which will restore mailing list subscriptions and site access.

Deactivating a user's account prevents the user from logging into protected areas of the web site or accessing special online tools. Inactive accounts are not sent automated email notifications concerning membership renewal. An inactive user who tries to get a login link will either see an error message or receive an email explaining that their account is inactive, rather than being sent a new login link.

The benefits of deactivating an account rather than deleting it are significant: deactivation makes it easy to restore the member's access if necessary and keeps all historical reference of the member's activities with the organization intact. If the user or company was deactivated by mistake, it's very easy to make amends. If, on the other hand, the account record was deleted by mistake, full recovery may not be possible.

Figure 5.1. The Effects of Deactivation vs. Deletion

When a member permanently cancels their membership or a user requests their information be removed from the organization's database, it may be necessary to delete the member's account information in order to comply with your organization's privacy policy. Deleting an account is permanent and removes all information about this account from the database.

Many kinds of data associated with the user or company outside the scope of Kavi Members can be deleted when you delete a user or company, since one of the responsibilities of Kavi Members is to store member data for use by applications throughout the system. For example, deleting a company in Kavi Members can also trigger the deletion of the following data.