Who is this article for?

Please Review Owners managing multi-phase reviews.

Review Owners have permissions to create multi-phase reviews.

A multi-phase review refers to a review process that is divided into multiple stages or phases. Instead of conducting a single review where all feedback is gathered at once, the review process is broken down into several sequential phases, each with a specific focus. This approach can be beneficial for large or complex documents, as well as documents that undergo multiple rounds of revision.

Multi-phase reviews provide additional flexible review workflows with options for sequential, multi-phase reviews in which each phase may be collaborative or independent. This article will show simple steps to set up and manage a multi-phase review.

1. Multi-Phase Review Introduction
2. Multi-Phase Review Set Up
3. Multi-Phase Reviews and Zones
4. Multi-Phase Review Control
5. Further Reading

1. Multi-Phase Review Introduction

A multi-phase review is a collection of individual reviews which are managed centrally by the Review Owner. The Owner receives a consolidated view of comments and may select which comments transition between phases while retaining complete records of separate individual phases.

This has several advantages and consequences:

• Each phase is a separate review and can have separate Reviewers. If a Reviewer is in multiple phases, the phases will appear as separate reviews in the Reviewer’s inbox. However, Phase 2 (for example) will not appear until Phase 1 is complete and is listed under ‘Completed Reviews'.
• All review options are available and apply individually to each phase. A review could be collaborative for one phase and independent for another phase. Offline review could be enabled for one phase and not for another, and so on.

2. Multi-Phase Review Set Up

Setting up a multi-phase review is enabled by selecting the multi-phase review option when setting up a new review. The options include the defaults for review progression between the phases:

• The review progression options include automatic progression from phase to phase, and any comments to include in the next phase. These defaults can be overridden for each phase.
• The automatic progression allows progress to the next phase of the review either when all Reviewers have indicated that they have completed their review, or if the review end date is reached. If both options are selected, the review will progress on the first event.
• Alternatively, the Review Owner can manually progress the review to the next phase using the Review Control Panel.

The Review Owner can also select which comments are included in the next phase, using the options available:

Important: A review cannot progress to the next phase until all edit-in-Wordzones are either completed or deleted.

Here are a few other things to note about multi-phase review set up:

• If the review includes participants with the role of ‘Viewer’, this role is not considered in the automatic progression to the next phase.
• All other review options are the same as for a standard review. Note, however, that zones are specific to each phase, or you have the option to copy the zones from a previous phase from the Review Control Panel.

Selecting ‘Add’ in the 'new review' setup wizard will add a phase:

The Owner is then able to edit each phase to specify the participants and to overwrite (if required) the review options for each phase. Specifying participants is the same process as in a standard review setup.

The documents can also be previewed, and zones set up before the review is started.

Note: It is recommended that you add all phases prior to editing them to set details. You cannot add or remove phases after the review setup is complete.

The final stage is similar to the standard review except that the review phases are shown instead of the participants:

3. Multi-Phase Reviews and Zones

Edit-in-Word zones can only be set up in the first phase of a multi-phase review. If you attempt to add a Contributor to any other phase you will get a warning that this is not allowed.
All edit-in-Word zones in Phase 1 must be deleted or completed before Phase 2 can be started. All other zone functionality works in the usual way.

4. Multi-Phase Review Control

The Review Control Panel for a multi-phase review shows the progress of the phases rather than the individual Reviewers in each phase.

The Owner can ascertain the status of each individual Reviewer in each phase by selecting the ‘details’ option:

5. Further Reading

• Getting Started with Review Templates
• How to Create a New Review