HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 3,828
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
I help manage the Workspace tenant for my church - pro-bono of course. 
Simple request - please delete an old OU that is no longer used. The original purpose of the OU was to manage a couple of Chromebits that ran some announcement displays. They don't use this system anymore, so the OU was no longer needed.
In looking at the Devices screen, I was surprised there was no option to delete the devices, so I choose "Deprovision" instead. This made them disappear, but I could not delete the OU - I got this error:
"Organization has sub organizational units, users or devices and cannot be deleted."
There was no way I could find to produce a list of what devices, users or shared drives are connected to a specific OU, so I had to hand-scroll through a couple hundred users checking for any assigned to that OU - there were none.
Next, I went to the devices overview screen. It showed 0 ChromeOS devices, 60 or so Mobile Devices and 80-some Endpoints. Scrolling through the Mobile devices and Endpoints, they don't show which OU they are attached to, if any, and there isn't a column to add to the list for that info. Looking at the ChromeOS list, it didn't show any devices at all. No shared drives were attached to the OU either.
Since when I deprovisioned the Chromebits, it stated something about "this could take up to 48 hours", I waited a couple of days and tried again to delete the OU, same error. Checking all of the lists again didn't show any users, devices or shared drives, and there was never any sub-OUs under the problem OU, so Google and I were at an impasse.
I found one message in their support forums with this problem, but the only suggestion there was to open a support ticket – so I did just that. After a thrilling 65 minute support chat, I found the problem:
Once you add a device to the Google tenant, IT IS THERE FOREVER. There is no way to delete a device once added. You can do what I did and choose the “Deprovision” option, which then makes the device inactive and not-so-helpfully HIDES it from you. So the OU could not be deleted because the old Chromebit devices were still attached to that OU, but since they were hidden, you couldn’t tell they was attached. The devices list showed "0 Devices".
The fix was to go into the list of devices for that OU (which in my case showed NO devices), then change the filter above from the default status “Provisioned” to either “All” or “Deprovisioned”. Once you do that you can see the device again.
THEN, because there is no way to delete a device, your only choice is to MOVE it to another OU. I just moved that old Chromebits to the parent OU. That removed it from the problem OU, and then after that, I could finally delete that OU altogether.
I have no idea how organizations that have hundreds or thousands of devices (like, you know, SCHOOLS, which are one of Googles main markets) handle devices. This makes me want to create an OU titled “Device Graveyard” or something like that. I think the inability to delete a device is a stupid development decision and I told the support guy as much. He chose not to comment on that.
Well, I know a little bit more about Google Workspace today than I did yesterday (even if it is dumb), so I guess that’s a win?
Simple request - please delete an old OU that is no longer used. The original purpose of the OU was to manage a couple of Chromebits that ran some announcement displays. They don't use this system anymore, so the OU was no longer needed.
In looking at the Devices screen, I was surprised there was no option to delete the devices, so I choose "Deprovision" instead. This made them disappear, but I could not delete the OU - I got this error:
"Organization has sub organizational units, users or devices and cannot be deleted."
There was no way I could find to produce a list of what devices, users or shared drives are connected to a specific OU, so I had to hand-scroll through a couple hundred users checking for any assigned to that OU - there were none.
Next, I went to the devices overview screen. It showed 0 ChromeOS devices, 60 or so Mobile Devices and 80-some Endpoints. Scrolling through the Mobile devices and Endpoints, they don't show which OU they are attached to, if any, and there isn't a column to add to the list for that info. Looking at the ChromeOS list, it didn't show any devices at all. No shared drives were attached to the OU either.
Since when I deprovisioned the Chromebits, it stated something about "this could take up to 48 hours", I waited a couple of days and tried again to delete the OU, same error. Checking all of the lists again didn't show any users, devices or shared drives, and there was never any sub-OUs under the problem OU, so Google and I were at an impasse.
I found one message in their support forums with this problem, but the only suggestion there was to open a support ticket – so I did just that. After a thrilling 65 minute support chat, I found the problem:
Once you add a device to the Google tenant, IT IS THERE FOREVER. There is no way to delete a device once added. You can do what I did and choose the “Deprovision” option, which then makes the device inactive and not-so-helpfully HIDES it from you. So the OU could not be deleted because the old Chromebit devices were still attached to that OU, but since they were hidden, you couldn’t tell they was attached. The devices list showed "0 Devices".
The fix was to go into the list of devices for that OU (which in my case showed NO devices), then change the filter above from the default status “Provisioned” to either “All” or “Deprovisioned”. Once you do that you can see the device again.
THEN, because there is no way to delete a device, your only choice is to MOVE it to another OU. I just moved that old Chromebits to the parent OU. That removed it from the problem OU, and then after that, I could finally delete that OU altogether.
I have no idea how organizations that have hundreds or thousands of devices (like, you know, SCHOOLS, which are one of Googles main markets) handle devices. This makes me want to create an OU titled “Device Graveyard” or something like that. I think the inability to delete a device is a stupid development decision and I told the support guy as much. He chose not to comment on that.
Well, I know a little bit more about Google Workspace today than I did yesterday (even if it is dumb), so I guess that’s a win?
