Love your writeup!

Similar to Connie , our environment also uses some Teams, AD Groups, and the wonderful option #3 she listed, where some processes route trees are determined by a SQL lookup managed by a business process owner to do. 

Even with all that, there still exists the possibility an email task or approval are set to an invalid user. 

Here's a SQL query which returns the process affected, with the name of the step to look at. The URL takes you to the process modeler of the affected process. Maybe this can help you the meantime. :/

SELECT steps.process_id, steps.step_id, CONCAT('https://yourlfserver/forms/bp/routing/',steps.process_id) AS url, steps.name, users.displayname, users.sid
FROM [YOUR FORMS DATABASE SERVER].[dbo].[cf_users] users INNER JOIN [YOUR FORMS DATABASE SERVER].[dbo].[cf_bp_steps] steps
ON steps.definition_json like '%'+users.sid+'%'
WHERE users.is_activated = 0 AND users.sid LIKE 'S%'

Returns: 

Be sure to change the URL and Database Server Name to whatever is applicable to you. 

Cheers,

Carl

This is a topic that has been of extreme concern to me, as well.  Here are the things I've tried:

1) Forms Teams - I can't remember why, but this was not successful.  I was hoping that I could set up a team where each person's "Role" was their job description and have the role be the team component that would assign tasks in forms for processes.  That worked on a very limited basis, but didn't really resolve all my problems and not at all for WORKFLOW.

2) Windows Account - I had hoped, at one time, that Forms and Workflow could access an employee role (job title) off our Windows Active Directory Account credentials, but I wasn't successful with this.  I am not IT, though, and I'm not certain we fully explored all avenues for this option.

3) SQL data source for the employees - I came across a demonstration from a neighbouring municipality in a Laserfiche Workshop where they showed us how they had built an interface ("Dynamic Fields Editor") that they used to assist their staff in picking metadata to assist in records classification.  During the demonstration, I realized that this same concept could work for my growing concern regarding hard-coding forms and workflows with specific employee emails and names.  This is now set up and working beautifully for me!!!

Regarding Option 3 - Just prior to this workshop mentioned in Option 3, I had experienced this hardship when an employee left and I had to go into every form process, every piece of those form processes, and every workflow related to those form processes in order to find any mention of this employee's name or email address, and change all of those to another employee.  This solidified my growing fear regarding our paperless processes of which I was creating more and more of each year.  Thankfully, our neighbouring municipality agreed to share how they set up their SQL db and dynamic fields editor for me to be able to use the same idea for employee roles (job titles).  I then altered all my forms processes and workflows to lookup this db source to search out names or email addresses based on job titles.  Now, I don't have to worry about future employee changes.  I only have to change one place each time there is an employee change and all my processes will continue to send info to the right person.

FINAL NOTE:  I don't feel my solution is the best.  I firmly believe that there should be a place in Laserfiche where every organization should be able to provide an identifier of some kind that could be used easily by forms and workflow to tag these tools for auto filling names and email addresses according to roles.  I look forward to seeing any advances that Laserfiche would be able to provide in this area.