Who is this article for?

Please Review Users setting sub reviews.

Review Owners with permissions to set up sub-reviews.

Sub-reviews in Please Review are a powerful way to facilitate more in-depth and focused collaboration on specific document sections. 

1. Sub-Reviews
2. Zones and Sub-Reviews
3. Further Reading

Sub-Reviews

As the Owner of the review, you can allow the review participants to create a ‘sub-review’. Sub-reviews allow a review participant to create a new review (a sub-review) with the same documents but add their own set of review participants, decide the comments and changes, and then publish a sub-set of the comments and changes from the sub-review back to the master review. The review participant setting up a sub-review must be an 'Author' on the system and can set-up the sub review in any Workgroup in which they are an Author.

• Owners of sub reviews can remove review document(s) as long as at least one review document remains, and they are able to add additional reference or feedback documents to their sub reviews
• Owners of sub reviews accept or close the comments and changes made within a sub review in normal Please Review fashion. They are then able to publish the accepted changes and comments back to the master review where they will appear as open comments and changes made by the sub review Owner (i.e. the master review participant).
• There is an option to ensure that any changes accepted in a master review, whilst a sub review is ongoing, are merged into the sub review to ensure all participants are working on the most up-to-date version of the review document.

For a sub review to be created the master review Owner must enable permission at ‘New review step 4’:

Note: the allow sub-review option is controlled by Workgroup configuration and therefore the option may not be available in the review set up for certain Workgroups or review types. If the ‘allow sub-review’ has been enabled for a review, the review participant can create the sub-review from the Review Control Panel.

Zones and Sub-Reviews

The use of zones and sub-reviews together is not recommended or officially supported. If a review contains edit-in-Word zones, the sub-review functionality is not available.

If the master review includes reviewer permission zones, they are reflected in the sub-review based on the permissions set for the participant creating the sub-review (for example, any zones where the participant permission is ‘hidden’ will not be included in the document of the sub-review). Additionally, zones cannot be added in the sub-review.

Note: If zones are added, amended, or deleted within a review after a sub-review has been created, they are not reflected in the sub-review, and the original permissions apply.

Important: If a sub-review has already been created it is possible for the master review Owner to create zones, but only by amending a review participant’s role. The use of edit-in-Word zones once a sub-review has been created can lead to data loss in the sub-review and will prevent the publishing of sub-review comments and changes to the any updated zones in the master review.

We strongly advise against the use of zones where sub-reviews are intended or are already underway.

Further Reading

• How to Merge Changes to the Master Review