Guidelines for Exiting Faculty and Staff

Access to WFU account contents is only provided to current faculty, staff and students. Retirees may refer to the "What services/software do retirees get to keep" question below.

Wake Forest permits retirees to retain access to their @WFU.edu Google Workspace account. Please view the WFU Retained Services Document for other services. Access to licensed software applications is removed in accordance with vendor licensing agreements.

Data in disabled accounts is retained for a period of time to ensure continuity of university operations.

Individuals are required to work with their former supervisor or chair to determine if a request can be made.

Google does not provide an easy way to do this. Even so, it’s best to learn how to manage files by reading What are shared drives? - Google Workspace Learning Center to selectively share your Google files within a Shared Drive in advance of leaving. It can be helpful to create a Shared Drive for your valuable and relevant documents, and share access with the individuals who may need them. You may also designate subfolders along themes. Taking this approach helps to avoid sharing large volumes of personal or unneeded files with other individuals.

Shared Drives are helpful for longer term, important materials especially those which multiple individuals are involved in and working on. Creating shared drives in Google Drive can help with managing access to documents as well as to ensure access by multiple team members, long term. To understand how shared drives can help your team organize efforts and their documents, review the guide on What are shared drives? - Google Workspace Learning Center.

A department chair (faculty) or supervisor (staff) may request an extension for the exiting individual. Please contact your (former) supervisor/chair to see if this would be possible. We defer to the supervisor/chair for any faculty or staff extension requests, and they would initiate that request.

It is recommended to set up a vacation responder with this information before you lose access to your account. Your account will still be able to send out automated responses for 30 days after you lose access. Google provides helpful information on how to configure this feature in Send an automatic reply when you're out of office - Computer - Gmail Help to set up a vacation responder.