Roles

A person responsible for the changes or documents under review. Usually, authors respond to comments and questions made by reviewers and observers.

Reviewers are “vital” participants responsible for inspecting the documents, creating defects, and commenting. A good practice is to have multiple reviewers, however, this is not required.

Observers are participants who watch the review process and who can make comments. However, they are not as critical for the review as reviewers. They have no power to promote a review to the next phase, nor cancel the promotion. Typically, you assign the Observer role to someone with special expertise on an issue.

An administrator who controls the review process. This is an optional role that does not exist in pre-defined role configurations. You can use this role if your organization has some formal review workflow, in which one person can lead and control the review.

The configuration name. Used to identify the configuration, visible only within the ADMIN section of Collaborator UI.

The role name as users will see it in reviews and messages. Can contain native-language characters. So, you can replace English role names with their native analogues. For instance, below you can see French role names in the review screen:

Important:

• An empty Title disables the role. Title cannot be empty for the Author role.

• The Author role must be in the second column. It can be renamed, but must always exist.

  The Author role is a special Collaborator concept, authors always have special responsibilities. For example, when a review is in the Rework phase the author’s Action Items list will say “Rework defects found” while other participants will see “(No Action Required) Waiting for author to rework defects”.

An arbitrary description of the role.

Specifies if a review participant will be able to edit, fix or delete defects that this participant created.

None means the participant may create defects, but are not allowed to edit, delete or mark them as fixed.

Administrators can always change or delete any defect regardless of this parameter value.

Typically, authors are not allowed to mark their defects fixed. However, all other roles are allowed to do this.

This parameter applies to the ability to externalize a defect.

Specifies if a review participant will be able to change defects created by other participants.

Administrators can always change or delete any defect regardless of this parameter value.

This parameter is meaningful if the Restrict Access to Fix Defect setting is set to “No”. Otherwise, the parameter is ignored.

The parameter applies to the ability to externalize a defect.

Specifies if a review participant with this role can approve a review.

If you set Yes for this parameter, then —

• Review participants will have the “Send to completed” button in the review screen:

  

• When they click this button, the State column in the review participant list will display Approved.

This parameter should be set to Yes for the roles that are obliged to actively participate in a review (report defects, make comments, and so on). As a rule, all the roles except for Author have this parameter enabled. Authors are usually not supposed to control the review completion, and their approval is not needed.

Specifies if a review phase change requires that participants with this role complete reviewing. This applies to the “Inspection -> Rework” and “Inspection -> Completed” changes. If this parameter is Yes and some of participants with this role have not yet approved the review, Collaborator will not change the phase.

Typically, you enable this parameter for Reviewers and disable for Observers.

This parameter has effect only if Marks reviews "finished" is also enabled.

Specifies if participants with this role are required to mark all the comments as “read” before completing a review.

Usually, you set this parameter to Yes for Authors and, probably, Reviewers. Authors need to read all the comments, and Reviewers typically collaborate and discuss potential issues, and read comments of each other.

You can set this parameter to No if in your workflow participants work independently. For instance, in some workflows reviewers independently submit comments to the author, who is then in charge of all changes without having to communicate back to reviewers.

Also, you may use the No value for Observer-type roles, because quite often observers join the discussion at specific points and do not need to see what all other users say.

Note that this parameter does not prevent anyone from coming back to the review and continuing to actively participate at any time.

Specifies if participants with this role are allowed to modify the review title, template, custom fields and other data in the General Information section on the review screen.

Typically, all review participants may do this, but you might want to limit access to this data for certain roles in your workflow.

Specifies if participants with this role are required to sign off or decline to sign off a completed review.

This parameter has effect if template-based electronic signatures are enabled in General Settings.

The minimum number of participants with this role required in the review. Can be zero to indicate completely optional roles. Typically, should be non-zero for Reviewers. Ideally, should be more than 1 for Reviewers as it is good have multiple reviewers in a review.

For the Author role the minimum allowed value is 1.

The maximum number of participants with this role allowed in a review. The maximum supported number per role is 999.

Usually, there is no reason to limit the maximum number of review participants, except for highly formal review workflow with strict limits.

Applied to roles that are required to complete reviews. Specifies the minimum number of users of this role required to approve the review before the completion. 0 means all users with this role should approve the review.

This value should be less than or equal to the value specified in Min # per review parameter for a role.