Sometimes you may want certain approvers to review changes only after others have approved a change first. This can save them from being disturbed too often by changes that go back and forth between the drafter and approvers. Typically this would apply to higher-up approvers such as a department head or C-level staff member.

To facilitate this we have a feature called Approval Levels. 

Users

Every user can have a level specified, but by default all users are at the same (first) level. This is defined at the User level ("Users" tab), so specific users can be set at different approval levels from other users.

To edit this, go to the User entry (on the Users tab) for that particular approver. Then edit that user and change the "Approval Level" setting. By default all users are considered in the First approval level, and all those approvers will be notified at the same time. If you set the approval level to be Second, for example, then they will be asked to review only after all First level approvals are complete. 

You can also set the approval level to be Last. This means they will always be last, even if (in a future release) we decide to add more levels than 4.

This setting applies to all article-level approvals throughout the system for that particular user.

User Groups

You can also override the approver level for a specific user group, for when user groups are selected as approvers. You edit this on the user group itself. If the approver level is set on the user group, then all the users in that group will have the specified approver level set instead of the approver level set at the user level.

This only applies for where a User Group is selected as an approver. If the user is selected instead of the group, then the user's approver level will be used.