Groups, recipients and substitutes

Roles say what each person can do in Zoan Cloud. Groups say who gets the work. Keeping them apart lets you, for example, have a single “Approver” role and route each approval to the right team (Purchasing, Treasury, Help desk), without creating one role per team.

	What it’s for	Where
Role	Permissions: view, decide, manage.	Administración › Roles and Usuarios
Group	Task recipient: members and their owner.	Administración › Grupos (Administration › Groups)

Create a group

1. Go to Administración › Grupos and click Nuevo grupo (New group).
2. Type the name (unique in the organization) and, optionally, a description.
3. In the group’s detail, add the members and pick the owner (one or more people). The owner doesn’t have to be a member: it can be the team lead.

A person can belong to several groups. Groups belong to the whole organization and apply in every environment; to see a task, the person also needs access to the environment and permission to see tasks.

Groups can come from Zoan Cloud (created here) or from Microsoft Entra ID (synced automatically; their members are managed in Entra). See Sync groups with Microsoft Entra ID.

Who a task can go to

Recipient	Who sees and decides it
A person	That person.
A role	Everyone with that role.
A group	Every member of the group, including people who join while the task is still open.
A group’s owner	The group’s owner (or owners).

In addition, in Zoan Flow flows:

Recipient	How it is resolved
From a case variable	The value of a variable (the output of a decision table or a form field) is read as a group (name or id), a group’s owner or a person (their email). Paths such as route.group work.
The owner of the initiator’s group	The owners of the groups of the person who started the case (not counting that person).

When you publish, the editor checks that the variable exists and that a fixed group has people with access to the environment. If, when the case gets there, there is nobody to address the task to —the variable is empty, the group was left without people or a trigger started the case—, the step becomes an incident with a message saying what is missing; you resolve it from the monitor.

From a robot, the Create Human Task activity addresses the task to a group with assignGroup (the group’s name). From the API, the recipient is { "kind": "group", "ref": "Purchasing" } or { "kind": "group_owner", "ref": "<group id>" }.

Whoever starts the case doesn’t decide their own approval

In every person task of a flow, No puede decidir quien inició el caso (the case’s initiator can’t decide) leaves the person who started the case out of the recipient, even if they are in the role or group: they don’t see it or decide it, and the rest of the team does. It is on by default when the decisions are approvals (for example, Aprobar and Rechazar) and you can change it under Quién decide; a flow published before this option gets it when you publish it again. If nobody is left without that person, the step becomes an incident with the reason. Reassigning or escalating the task keeps them out. Every time the recipient includes the case’s initiator it is recorded in the audit log, whether the option is on or not.

If the recipient comes from an input variable (filled in by whoever starts the case, also from the start form), the editor warns you when publishing: the initiator could choose who approves. For approvals, take the recipient from a decision table.

Escalation

If a task misses its deadline, it can be reassigned once to a group or its owner: in the organization policy (Administración › Organización y SSO › Plazos de atención de tareas), with escalateToGroup in the activity or with escalate_to in the API.

Substitutes

Before going on vacation, register your substitute in Mi cuenta › Suplencia (My account › Substitute): pick the person, the start date (empty = from now) and the end date.

While the substitution is in effect, tasks that reach you also reach your substitute: both see them and either can decide. Nothing is left waiting, and if you come back early you still have them. It applies to tasks addressed to you, also when you are a group’s owner; group and role tasks are already seen by the other members.

• What reached you before the substitution doesn’t change.
• A person has one substitution at a time; to change it, remove the current one and register another.
• Whoever has the Registrar o quitar la suplencia de otras personas permission (register or remove other people’s substitutes; by default, Owner and Administrator) does it from the person’s page in Administración › Usuarios.
• Everything is in the audit log: who registered or removed each substitution and which tasks the substitute was added to.

Permissions

Permission	What it allows	Default
group:list	See Administration › Groups, members and owner.	Owner, Administrator
group:manage	Create, edit and delete groups; choose and sync Microsoft Entra ID groups.	Owner, Administrator
delegation:manage	Manage anyone’s substitute.	Owner, Administrator

Everyone registers their own substitute with no extra permission. You can give these permissions to a custom role.

Next steps

• Sync groups with Microsoft Entra ID
• Tasks
• Design on the canvas