Use Cases

See how the new groups experience simplifies pilot rollouts, retention policies, regional settings, and settingless groups.

Where the new experience solves legacy group management challenges

Rolling out a feature pilot to a subset of users requires only one exception group instead of paired enabled/disabled groups

When an organization wants to pilot a new feature, such as AI Companion, for a subset of users while keeping it disabled for everyone else, the legacy model required creating paired groups: one with the feature locked on and another with the feature locked off. If users in the pilot group also needed regionalized settings like data storage locations, the administrator had to create additional duplicate groups per region, because the primary group designation that controlled the feature lock also controlled the regional settings. This resulted in complex group expansion that scaled with every combination of feature and region.

In the new experience, the administrator creates a single exception group at a higher priority than the baseline, configured with only the AI Companion settings tab. Users in the pilot group inherit AI Companion settings from the exception group, while all other settings—including regional configurations—are inherited from their other groups based on priority. No paired groups are needed, and no regional duplicates are required.

Differentiated retention policies use priority ranking instead of the legacy "most restrictive setting" logic

Organizations that need different retention periods for different user populations. For example, regulated users require a 10-year Zoom Chat retention period, while most others only need the 30-day default.

Differing needs created a specific challenge under the legacy model. Zoom Chat applied the most restrictive setting when a user belonged to multiple groups. If a user was in any group where Chat was configured with the shorter retention period, that shorter period applied regardless of other group memberships. This forced administrators to create separate groups and carefully manage membership to avoid unintended retention downgrades.

In the new experience, priority ranking determines which group's Chat retention settings take effect. A higher-priority group configured with the 10-year retention period overrides the baseline group's 30-day setting for users in both groups. The most restrictive setting logic no longer applies. The highest-priority group's value wins, giving administrators predictable control over differentiated retention policies.

Regional data residency requirements can be addressed with groups that manage only storage and audio conferencing settings

Organizations with users across multiple regions often need to configure data storage locations and audio conferencing dial-in numbers differently by region. In the legacy model, regional groups carried all product settings tabs, which meant any settings change in a regional group could unintentionally affect product settings unrelated to the group's regional purpose.

In the new experience, regional groups can be configured with only the General settings tab, for data storage location, and the Audio Conferencing tab, without managing any other product settings. This means a user's regional group controls where their data is stored and which dial-in numbers are available, while all other settings—Meetings, AI Companion, Zoom Chat, and others—are inherited from other groups based on priority. Regional configuration no longer creates side effects in unrelated settings categories.

Settingless groups enable organizational use cases without complicating settings policy

Not every group needs to manage product settings. The new experience supports settingless groups—groups with no product settings attached and no priority ranking—for organizational use cases where group membership serves a purpose other than settings management.

Workspace reservation neighborhoods allow administrators to reserve specific desks or workspaces for members of a particular group, controlling who can book which physical spaces without attaching any Zoom product settings to the group. App marketplace assignment lets administrators approve a third-party Zoom app for members of a specific group rather than all users in the account, scoping app availability without affecting any other settings. Compliance role scoping allows administrators to create custom admin roles that are restricted to managing only users within a specific group, providing scoped administrative access to a subset of users without granting full account-level privileges.

Because settingless groups don't participate in settings resolution, they can't create unintended policy side effects: Administrators can create as many as needed for organizational purposes without affecting any user's product settings.