By now you have begun to add some users to your institution, but you may want to go back and change some of the details that you entered when you first created them. You can do this, using the User account settings section. Each user in your institution has his/her own site account settings. You can reach this page by clicking on a username on the User search page.

These account settings subdivide into three sections — each with configurable options for your user:

Site account settings allow you to create a new password for your institution users (provided they are internal and not authentication via a different method). This comes in handy later if your users ever forget their old one. It is also useful to notice that you can set an account expiry date and that you can reconfigure the user's file quota limit (given that the site administrator has allowed you to do this).

You can also suspend a user under the option to suspend/delete user. Suspending the user has the effect of stopping them from logging-in and using the Mahara system. There are many reasons why you might do this, ranging from response to inappropriate behavior through non-payment of user fees (some organizations charge their clients to use Mahara) to termination of a paid course. Whatever your reason, it is a good idea to use the text entry box provided to explain to the user why their access has been suspended. It is shown to the users the next time they try to log in. Once you have suspended a user, you can delete them completely by entering into the Suspended users tab. You can tick the check boxes for all the users you wish to erase, and then click on the Delete users button. You will, naturally, receive a warning asking you if you are sure you want to take this (irreversible) action before you do. If you are sure, go ahead and delete these users permanently — remember they cannot be retrieved easily (if at all), if you do this.

Janet Norman from PI Inc. thinks:
	I like that the institution administrators can delete a user if they choose to, but I actually encourage them to do no more than suspend these users from their institution. This is partly because when an employee leaves one PI Inc. branch, they might move to another one of our branches, elsewhere.

Finally, you can set Institution settings for your user. Here, you will notice that you can choose to automatically expire a user's membership of your institution at a certain point. You may also choose to give the learner an ID number within your institution. The final thing to note is that you can use this page to turn a user into an institution administrator or alternatively set them up as an institution staff member. You will look at the type of things a staff member can do later on in this chapter: