Changing roles, deactivating, and reactivating
People change jobs and people leave. Scout HQ keeps those two things separate: changing someone's role changes what they may do, and deactivating their seat — their place in the workspace — stops their access without erasing any of their work. Both are Owner and Admin actions on the People & roles page.
Screenshot: Settings → Workspace → People & roles.
What each role can do
The page itself carries this summary under WHAT EACH ROLE CAN DO, and it is the short version of the whole permission model.
| Role | What Scout says it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Full access and visibility. |
| Admin | Full access and visibility except billing. |
| Member | Access, visibility, and management of work assigned to them or their team(s). |
| Viewer | Read-only access and visibility of work assigned to them or their team(s). |
There are no custom roles and no team-lead permissions. A role grants abilities; it never makes anyone a universal reader of other people's email. For the longer treatment see Roles: Owner, Admin, Member, Viewer and Who can see what.
Change someone's role
- Open Settings → Workspace → People & roles.
- Find the person's row and choose the ⋯ button at its right edge. The Edit person dialog opens with their name and email underneath the title.
- Use the Workspace role menu — "Controls what this person can see and change." — and pick Admin, Member, or Viewer.
- The change saves as soon as you pick it; a small spinner shows while it is being written. Choose Done to close the dialog.
Owner is not in that menu, and your own row has no ⋯ button — you cannot change your own role. Moving the Owner seat is a separate action described in Transferring ownership.
Deactivate a seat
Deactivating is what you do when someone leaves the company or moves off the promotional products side of the business. Scout shows you the consequences before it does anything.
- Open the person's Edit person dialog from People & roles, or open a team they belong to and choose Deactivate seat… from their row's actions menu.
- Choose Review deactivation. Scout checks the live state of their work and shows the impact — it does not guess.
- Read the summary. The full dialog lists WHAT HAPPENS, IN ORDER:
- Their mailbox sync stops now. Nothing new is read, and prior conclusions remain.
- Open assignments return to the team as unclaimed, and the count is named.
- Sole-audience points enter Admin triage — these are items whose only authority to exist was that person's own mailbox, so an Admin has to decide what happens to them.
- Entitlements are revoked, and every membership ends, including Everyone. Their next check-in signs them out.
- History stays. Past work and audit records stay attributed to them.
- Choose Deactivate seat (or Confirm deactivation from the compact version in Edit person).
Two deactivations are refused outright. You cannot deactivate your own seat, and you cannot deactivate the Owner — Scout answers "Transfer ownership before deactivating the Owner seat."
Reactivating someone
Deactivated is not deleted. The dialog says so plainly: reactivation restores only the seat and history. Teams and source entitlements must be deliberately re-granted, and assignments stay with the teams they went back to. In practice, bringing someone back means three things after the seat is live again: add them to their teams, set their primary team, and have them reconnect their own mailbox, because a personal mailbox connection is retired when the seat is deactivated and only its owner can connect it.
Reactivating a seat is an Owner or Admin action. A self-serve control for it is not on the People & roles page today; if you need a deactivated seat brought back, contact Scout support and name the workspace and the person.
Good to know
- A deactivated person still appears in the roster, greyed out, so the record of who was here stays visible. Their row no longer offers a role menu.
- Downgrading someone to Viewer is the gentler option when they should keep seeing their team's work but stop acting on it. A Viewer cannot claim, handle, dismiss, or assign anything, and can only manage their own brief and notification preferences.
- Changing a role takes effect on the next thing they do — permissions are checked on the server for every action, so an interface left open on another screen cannot act with the old role.
- Role changes and deactivations are recorded with your name and the time, and those records cannot be edited afterwards.
- Nothing here touches the person's Scout account itself. Their sign-in, password, and two-factor settings belong to them and follow them into any other workspace they are a member of.