The content in this user guide currently reflects TeamOrgChart Classic and may not match the redesigned interface. Updated guidance for the new UI is in progress.
Why vacant positions matter
All organizations will have vacant positions at some point in time. People leave and join organisations all the time. In fact, according to research by the UK's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), an astonishing 27.4% of British workers change employer in a given year.
Therefore, efficiently managing vacant positions is a key feature of organization charting software and it is a leading reason why organization charts can become out of date and inaccurate.
One of the main limitations of Microsoft Organization Explorer is that positions in the chart require a Microsoft Entra ID account. If the person has not joined your organization, it is unlikely that a user account will exist for them in the directory, and you will most likely not even know the person's name at this point.
Similarly, if a person has resigned and their account is removed from Entra, they will disappear from the organization chart. Unfortunately, so will any people who reported to them.
TeamOrgChart provides a number of features to help you manage vacant positions within your Entra chart more effectively.
Manually manage leavers in TeamOrgChart
To create a vacant position, the chart administrator should put the chart into Edit Mode by pressing Ctrl+E.
Select the position that should be vacant, then select Make vacant from Quick actions in the side panel.
TeamOrgChart converts the current position into a vacant position and moves any direct reports that currently report to the manager so they report to the newly created vacant position.
This preserves the organizational hierarchy, allowing the full organization chart to be navigated and viewed.
When the replacement person is hired and their Entra account is created as part of the onboarding process, TeamOrgChart will detect the new account and add them to the organization chart.
Direct reports that report to the vacant position will be moved to their new manager when the manager-to-direct-report relationship is updated in Microsoft Entra ID.
Finally, when no direct reports remain attached to the vacant position, the vacant position box is automatically removed from the chart.
Use conditional rules to manage leavers
Manually adding vacant positions is simple and gives you a lot of control over the process. However, it is still a manual process.
The conditional rules feature of TeamOrgChart allows you to automate this process as part of your business processes.
To configure this, first make a simple change to your leavers process: mark the person's Entra record with an indicator that tells TeamOrgChart to treat the person's account as a vacant position.
In this example, when someone resigns from the company, their Microsoft 365 (Entra ID) account is disabled and the text (RESIGNED) is appended to their display name. This makes it easy to identify who has left or is leaving the organization.
The second step is to create a conditional rule in TeamOrgChart that treats positions containing RESIGNED as vacant positions.
The rule below tests whether DisplayName contains the word RESIGN, then applies the Make Vacant effect.
TeamOrgChart applies conditional rules dynamically. As people are updated to indicate that they have resigned, their positions are automatically converted into vacant positions.
