Groups - Overview | Admin Guide - Zoho Directory

Groups - Overview

Groups are used in Zoho Directory to simplify user management. Groups allow you to provide app access to and enforce security policies for multiple users simultaneously. If you're using Zoho Mail, you will also be able to create email aliases for groups, and use them to email all group members at once.

There are two types of groups in Zoho Directory:
  1. Collaboration Groups: These are flexible, ad-hoc groups that can be used to meet any custom, niche requirements. For example, you can create a group with all of your organization's managers, allowing them to share and collaborate on their documents; you can create a group with all of your organization's on-premise staff and impose an IP-restrictive security policy on that group; or you can create group email aliases for team-specific broadcasts or newsletters.
  2. Departments: These are rigid, structured groups that can be used to replicate your organization's hierarchical structure in Zoho Directory. They are similar to collaboration groups, the only difference being that a user cannot be added to more than one department.
  3. System-generated Groups: These are auto-generated groups that are created when a directory store is added to Zoho Directory. Users added to the store will be automatically added to this group. This group is a read-only group and is used to configure conditional assignment and security policies in bulk.
  4. Smart groups: A smart group can be created by setting certain criteria for it, so that every user who qualifies for the criteria gets added to the group automatically. The group is generally created by framing conditions (smart conditions) based on target user's commonality in criteria, such as the time of creation of their user profile, time zone, language, country, and more. With smart groups, it's easy to identify and categorize users with resembling backgrounds and more or less similar details. For example, you can create a separate group of all users who were created within the American time zone and whose language is not English. You can make different combinations of such smart rules that suit your needs. Once users are grouped this way, you can apply security settings based on group membership, making sure the right people have the right level of access. Plus, you can use smart groups for conditional assignments, like giving certain features or roles only to users who meet specific criteria. In short, smart groups help you automate and simplify user management while keeping everything secure and customized. Learn how to add and manage a smart group