Archer announces the General Availability of Document Governance Release September 17th, 2026

Summary

Archer announces the General Availability of Document Governance Release September 17th, 2026.

Release Details

This release makes the required action the clear focal point of every notification email, and introduces role-configurable permissions for documents, versions, and drafts.

One Clear Action in Every Notification Email

Notification emails now lead with a single, clearly-worded action button, like "Review now" or "Publish now", that takes the recipient straight to their required action, with supporting links demoted below it.

Configurable Roles and Permissions

Document Governance's permissions model is now more granular and configurable. Previously, a user's permissions on a document, version, or draft were limited to three fixed roles, and administrators had no way to change what each role was allowed to do. With this release, administrators can configure exactly what each role can do, without changing what roles exist.

What each role could do before:

• Owners could take any action on a document, version, or draft.
• Contributors could edit the content of an open version or draft.
• Readers could view a document, version, or draft, but make no changes.

What's new:

Owner, Contributor, and Reader still exist as roles, and Document Type Owner and Reviewer are configurable in the same way. Administrators can now pare down what each of these roles is allowed to do. For example, administrators can:

• Prevent Document Owners from being able to delete documents, versions, or drafts.
• Give Document Owners the ability to approve reviews, while preventing Version Owners from doing the same.
• Prevent Document Type Owners from approving or rejecting reviews on documents of their type, independent of whether Document Owners can.

This does not allow granting a role more permissions than it could have before. A Contributor or Reader role can never be configured with the same permissions as an Owner role. On the configuration screen, any role and permission combination that isn't allowed shows a "—" instead of a checkbox.

Configurable permissions:

• Assign collaborators
• Delete
• Advance workflow
• Publish
• Approve/reject
• Assign ad-hoc reviewers

Edit and Comment are currently locked together and are not yet configurable. Configuring them independently will be enabled in a future release.

At least one role in a configuration must always retain Advance, Publish, and Approve/Reject. Saving a configuration that would leave a document unable to move through workflow or review is blocked, and the admin is told which of the three is missing. Admins are excluded from this check since they always retain every permission; Document Type Owner is included.

How roles cascade:

Owner, Contributor, and Reader continue to cascade the way they did before, carrying their configured permissions down to nested resources:

• Document Type Owners hold their permissions on any document created under a document type they own, and on any versions and drafts within those documents.
• Document Owners hold their permissions on their document, and on any versions and drafts within it.
• Document Readers can only read a document's published version; this role doesn't cascade to versions or drafts.
• Version Owners, Contributors, and Readers hold their permissions on their version, and on any drafts within it.
• Draft Owners, Contributors, and Readers don't cascade to any other resource.
• Reviewers hold their permissions only on their assigned review draft. A workflow permission, such as Advance, applies only to the workflow stage containing that review draft.

A role holder doesn't gain a different role at a lower level. For example, a Document Owner keeps Document Owner permissions on an open version, rather than also becoming that version's Version Owner.

Document, version, and draft roles continue to be assigned from each resource's association page. The Reviewer role is assigned automatically to a document's workflow reviewers, or manually using the "Add review" button in a review stage.

New role defaults:

• By default, Version Owners can advance the workflow once their review is approved.
• By default, Document Type Owners cannot approve or reject a review.
• By default, Reviewers do not have Delete or Publish.

Any of these can be changed using the role configuration screen described above.

Also fixed in this release:

• When a review is rejected and sent back to the edit stage, the notification action button now links to the Edit Stage within the version overview, instead of the document version contents.

Release Window

We will be performing the upgrade on Thursday September 17th, 2026 between 9:00PM-11:00PM CT.