Change admin email to a new user in one step?

[ITSBC]

Can we change the admin email and name (mary@domain) to a new User (owner@domain, this user email does not exist yet) in one step or do we need to first create the new User and then change the Admin role to them?

To ask a different way, can we/should we effectively delete the old user email (mary@) at the same time as creating the new user email (owner@)?

If possible, is this recommended or not?

[icrew · Accepted solution]

Two thoughts, maybe slightly contradictory:

1) I would most definitely do "make before break"--that's far safer. Think about the case where for some reason the switch didn't work. You could possibly be completely locked out of your instance. Specifically, I'd do the following steps in order:

• Create the owner@domain account
• Make the owner@domain account into an admin
• Confirm that you can successfully log in as owner@domain, including to the admin console
• Only using owner@domain for a few days/weeks, just to make sure you really don't need mary@domain
• Remove mary@domain

2) You can just change the address for mary@domain to become owner@domain, no need to delete/recreate. See https://support.google.com/a/answer/9710299?hl=en

I think I should also mention that it's not a bad idea to have more than one admin account for an organization--it makes live a BUNCH easier if one of the admins loses their password/can't log in for some reason. But of course don't give an admin account to anyone you don't trust implicitly....

Hope that helps,

Ian