Need to have way of tracking down user managers (i.e. the people who can add users and make similar changes)

[GoogleCodeExporter]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: This issue tracking system is for Google Analytics developer products
only.
If you are not a developer/programmer visit:
http://www.google.com/analytics/support.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name of related component: Management API

Request summary:
There needs to be a way for users to determine who gave them status--i.e. who 
"owns" or manages the analytics for a given property.

Use Cases:
It is commonly the case that somebody is delegated to set up an analytics 
account for a property. Often this person is relatively low-level and/or 
temporary (i.e. because it is happening early in the history of a property). 
Later, the actual users may need to make changes, add additional users, and so 
on. 

Currently if there is any breakdown in communication or note-taking (all of 
which has to happen external to the app), there is no way of discovering what 
account actually manages the analytics account. The only solution is 
more-than-user level permissions are needed is to start a new analytics account.

Here are three different real world use cases, all from academia involving 
international teams that show the problem:

Case 1: Person x joins a project and was assigned user-level permissions by 
somebody several years ago as part of the process of joining it. Since this 
assignment was never discussed and they had no reason to access the analytics 
initially, they have no idea who assigned it to them. Now, after several years, 
they are assuming responsibility for the technical operations of the site, but 
by this point the name of the person who originally established the account--it 
might even have been a student--have been lost to time. There is no way of 
discovering who of the 10s of people--all of whom have multiple email 
accounts--has permission to modify user settings.

Case 2: Person y or one of their students set up an analytics account several 
years ago for several properties in a lab. They are now transferring one of the 
properties to a different project. The gmail accounts person y owns seem all to 
have user-level permissions only. Nobody can figure out which account actually 
has management permissions.

Case 3: A student is assigned a project email account and the task of adding 
analytics to a property during its construction. They then leave the project, 
which has multiple accounts for students. Several years later, the record of 
which student account was used to set the account up is lost.

You could say that a solution is to keep better records. In an ideal world we 
would; but unfortunately we live in this world. Information about usernames and 
passwords should always be recoverable from an online app. Especially 
administration accounts!

Original issue reported on code.google.com by daniel.o...@gmail.com on 27 Jun 2013 at 6:05