An administrator can activate or deactivate a user account. Both active and inactive users exist in the registry, but only active users can log on to CentraSite, and only active users can be granted permissions and ownership of assets.

You generally deactivate users who leave the company or cease to be valid users of the registry. Inactive users retain ownership of assets they owned when they were active. They cannot be assigned to groups, and cannot be a part of the approval group. You can also create inactive users who are actors within your SOA environment but are not actual users of the registry. For example, you might model certain line-of-business managers as users in the CentraSite registry so that you can express associations between these individuals and various assets in the registry. Such users might never log on to CentraSite themselves, and do not require an account that is active and linked to the external authentication system. However, the registry will know of these users, so assets can be associated with them. Points-of-contact for external parties such as suppliers and distributors are additional individuals that you might want to model as inactive users.