Groups

A group is a named list of people, for example "Accountants". You use it to say who should approve, who should be told or who may move a document, without naming each person every time. When someone joins or leaves the team, you change the group once and everything that uses it follows.

A group can also hold roles. If you give a group a role, everyone in the group holds that role for as long as they are in it, on top of the roles they hold themselves. A group with no roles gives nobody any rights: it is then only a way of saying who. The Owner role is given to people only, never to a group (see Roles and Permissions).

Admin or Owner role required.

Create a group

Open Workspace Settings and go to the People tab.
Select Groups.
Click Add Group.
Enter a Name.
Under Access, give the group its roles: for the Whole workspace, or click Add entity and give roles in that entity. A new entity starts with Member.
Under People, click Add People, pick everyone who belongs to it and click Add. You can pick several people at once.
Click Create.

To rename a group or change its roles or people, open it from the list. The search above People finds anyone in a long group. To take people out, tick them and click Remove from Group. Nothing changes until you click Save, and the bar at the bottom says what will change. You are offered only the roles you hold yourself where you give them. A group that is still used by a lifecycle or a workflow cannot be deleted; the message tells you where it is used, so you can remove it there first.

A deleted group is kept aside, not erased. It disappears from every list and choice, and from then on it gives nobody a role or access to a document, including documents that were shared with it. An approval that is already under way still asks its people. On a document's Share list, a share to it reads deleted. To find it, filter Groups by Deleted. It opens read-only. Restore Group in the ⋮ at the top brings it back with its people and roles, and everything it gave returns with it. Your AI assistant can do this too.

Use a group

To give people a role

Give the group a role and everyone in it holds that role. It is the shortest way to say "everyone in Accounting may approve": one change to the group, and the people in it gain or lose that role with it. Set them under Access on the group's page, or ask your AI assistant.

On a status move

A status move can be limited to people, groups or roles. Only those people can then make that move, for example Unlock on a validated document. An administrator it does not name cannot make it either. A document lock can spare the same way: it holds every person unless it names who it spares. Your workspace's own workflows are not held by it.

In an approval

In an approval step, Who Approves offers Submitted by, groups, roles and people together. Submitted by is whoever sent in the document. A role asks whoever holds it in the document's entity. Groups show how many people they have, and each kind has its own icon. You can mix them. A person who is named twice, on their own and through a group or role, is asked once. With a role or Submitted by in the list, How many must approve offers All of them, Any one, Most of them or A set number, because who they are is only known when the approval starts.

A person who has left the workspace shows as Removed person, and a removed group or role keeps its name, marked removed. Remove them from the list when you next edit the step.

When the approval starts, the group is replaced by the people in it at that moment. Those people decide the approval to the end. If someone joins or leaves the group while the approval is waiting, nothing changes for that approval: the same people are asked, and the same number of answers is needed. The next approval that starts uses the group as it is then.

On an approval, the Actions page and the document's Activity tab show the group with its people, for example "Accountants: Anna, Juris". A step that has not started yet shows the group's people as they are now.

In a notification

In a notification step, Who To Tell offers the same: Submitted by, groups, roles and people. The message goes to the people they stand for at the moment it is sent, each person once.

An empty group next to other people or groups is simply skipped. Only when everything chosen, all its groups and people together, comes to nobody:

An approval in a workflow fails, with a message saying nobody was found to ask.
An approval started by a status move ends as timed out, and the document follows whatever your lifecycle does with a timed-out approval.
A notification is not sent, and the step is recorded as failed.