If you want to avoid e-mail tag, you should probably include some alternate choices for the herd name. Now lets give an example of how you could use some herds if you were creative. Lets say you have a machine that you have a few staff on, but is mostly to support job tasks for some student workers, but not all student workers, and has a handful of real staff on it to oversee the student workers. You can create an account type staff that has no web display, and create the small group of staff accounts by hand with the ratsadmin tool. Then you could request either one herd you assign to all those student workers, or multiple herds.
XX here is a descriptor to make it a meaningful name.
Perhaps when you get new hires, you put them in the group, but force an expire in two weeks to deal with new hires who flake out and don't show up. Then you run this against the herd tool to set all the users who are good with an expiration date of the end of the year. However, you know you always get a number of students leaving mid year who graduate in winter. So in November, you whip up a list of those students, and set their expiration date to the end of the semester. Now you have a list of usernames you can purge from your system because they are really not eligible for your system even though they may have a valid herd setting, they stopped being students.