If a story needs sign-off from three different people before it can go out, you already know what that actually looks like. A word doc emailed to person one, who emails it to person two after making changes nobody tracked, who emails it to person three, who replies-all with a comment buried in paragraph four.
By the time it comes back, nobody's sure which version is the real one.
This is about sign-off from people outside your organization — a registrar, a dean, a provost — not your team's own internal review step.
Contoro handles this with External Review instead.
External Review sends a draft to a reviewer outside Contoro (no account required) so they can leave notes and request changes. The draft only moves to the next reviewer once the current one signs off.
- Reviewers can go one after another, in order, or several at once if a piece genuinely needs parallel eyes rather than a strict sequence.
Either way, the writer sees exactly where a draft stands and who's holding it up, instead of guessing from an inbox.
How External Review helps you work
- Every round of notes and revisions stays attached to the document. Nothing gets lost between reviewer two and reviewer three.
- A draft can't quietly slip past a reviewer who hasn't weighed in. If someone needs to move forward anyway, that's a deliberate choice, not an accident, and it's recorded.
- External reviewers see a clean, focused view of the draft. No account, no onboarding, no learning a new tool just to leave a note on one story.
We built this the way academic sign-off actually works, not the way generic approval tools assume it works. Because “get three unrelated people to agree, in order, without them all needing logins” is a genuinely different problem than a single editor approving a single draft.
If your team is still routing sign-off through emails and Slack messages and hoping the right version comes back, this is the part of the workflow that's easiest to fix first.