Optional Add-On Module for the collaboration of documents between internal and external users/participants. This module utilizes E-Approval (Electronic Approval) and/or E-Signature (Electronic Signature) processing to support full online negotiation via a secure online portal.
DOCUMENT COLLABORATION & E-SIGNATURE
NEW FEATURES
Every Approval and Signature Process in One List
Reference #: 260916.300.0003
The Negotiation Processes screen lists every approval and signature process raised anywhere in the system, not only the one you happened to open. Reach it from the main menu, or from a record, where it narrows to the processes raised on that record and its documents. Each row names the kind of process, the record it belongs to and that record's title, and the list can be searched, paged and downloaded. The download comes in the two shapes version 22.7 offered: a comma separated file of the processes themselves, one row each, for reconciling counts, and a spreadsheet in which every process is followed by its own participants, which is the one that answers who each process is waiting on across hundreds of them at once. Both carry whatever search and filters are in force on the screen rather than only the page on view, and a very large download is capped rather than being allowed to run away. Opening a row shows the console for that one process, with its groups, every participant and their state (pending, in process, approved, rejected, expired, optional, ignored, paused or voided) and the point the process is currently holding at. Where a package was sent through a licensed outside signing service, the console header carries an External e-signature action that opens that service's send.
How will this affect users?
Anyone responsible for chasing approvals or signatures can see the state of every process from one screen.
Pause, End, Re-Send and Replace Participants on a Running Process
Reference #: 260916.300.0004
The process console carries controls for intervening in a process that is already running: Pause and Resume, End a started process, Cancel one that has not started, re-send the current group's invitation, replace the person a participant is assigned to, and remove a participant who was added to a group by hand. Each participant row also carries Re-send this invitation, so chasing one late approver no longer emails everyone else still outstanding in that group; the group level resend remains as the way to nudge everybody at once. A control that is not available in the current state stays on screen, disabled, and gives the exact reason it would be refused rather than disappearing, so what is blocking a process is always readable. A process whose groups have all finished but whose package never completed is flagged in the list and can be finalized from the console, and that repair is refused in any other situation so it cannot be used to skip an approver.
How will this affect users?
Administrators can correct a running approval or signature process in place instead of canceling it and starting again.
Pre-Placed Signature Fields for Merge and Sign Jobs
Reference #: 260916.300.0009
A mass process job of the merge and sign kind can now carry signature fields placed on the document, so every generated copy is signed in the same place instead of anywhere on the page. Fields are placed on the template through the Add mass signing placeholders action on the attachment, or from the Where they sign step of the job setup, and the placement screen marks which file the job actually sends for signature so that fields are not placed on a file no signer will ever see. A job takes its own copy of the placements when it is created, so editing a job never changes the template or any other job built on it. A job with no fields configured still signs free form exactly as before, a document whose signature route resolves to more than one signer falls back to free form, and the run result says how many did.
How will this affect users?
Anyone running merge and sign jobs gets documents signed in a consistent place, and administrators prepare that placement once on the template.
Template Documents Are Checked for Placeholders That Will Never Fill In
Reference #: 260916.300.0012
Uploading a template file, publishing a version or saving an edit in the template workbench now checks every merge placeholder in the document against the fields, clauses, tables and static text that template actually carries. Anything that will not fill in is listed with the reason and, where the intent can be worked out, the ready to copy placeholder to use instead, covering close spellings, the same name written under a different kind of placeholder, and placeholders damaged by Word's automatic formatting. The check is advice and never a block: an upload or a publish saves first and then tells you, and a save in the editor pauses with Keep editing or Save anyway. The same check runs on clause files uploaded or published on the Mergeable Clauses screen.
How will this affect users?
End users are not affected as only System Administrators maintain templates and clauses. Template and clause authors hear about a placeholder that will not fill in while they can still correct it.
A Record Shows on Its Face That It Is Waiting on an Approval or Signature
Reference #: 260916.300.0027
A record with an approval or signature process still running carries a badge beside its title. Where the process is waiting on you the badge is an accented link straight to where you act; where it is waiting on somebody else it is a quiet gray note with a clock icon and is not clickable. Nothing appears when there is nothing outstanding, and a rejected or canceled process does not count as waiting. The badge says that the record is held rather than counting participants, because a large contract can have a great many participants outstanding and a number tells the reader nothing they can act on. Where a step has been handed to somebody else, the record's Approvals panel says so on both sides: the person who handed it over is told who holds it now, which is also why their own review buttons have gone, and the person who received it is told who it came from.
How will this affect users?
Anyone opening a record that is held up sees it at once, and anyone it is waiting on has one click to the place where they act.
DOCUMENT COLLABORATION & E-SIGNATURE
ENHANCEMENTS
Document Template Administration in One Workbench
Reference #: 260916.300.0002
Document authoring templates are administered on one workbench per template, with a numbered rail carrying the five stages of setting one up: Core setup, Subtables setup, Approvals & signing, Files/Attachments and Additional links. The core stage is a dashboard rather than a form, with a card for each thing that can be built on the template showing its count, a look at what is in it, and every merge placeholder ready to copy, with the template's own details edited alongside. A Placeholders drawer lists everything the template can merge so that the list is on hand while wording is being pasted into the document, and the final stage carries every document generated from the template together with the template's change history, which can be exported to a spreadsheet file. Every view has its own address, so any stage or tab can be bookmarked or sent to a colleague.
How will this affect users?
End users are not affected as only System Administrators have access to document template administration. Template administrators do all of their template work in one place.
One Signature Fields Workspace for Documents, Templates and Mass Signing
Reference #: 260916.300.0006
Signature fields, the screen for placing signature, initial, date and text boxes on a document, is a three pane workspace: the field palette and the document's signers on the left, the document in the middle, and the people to notify on the right. The signer list is also the picker for who the next field belongs to, and it shows how many fields each person already has, so a signer with none stands out at a glance. Each signer appears with their profile photo, or their initials in their own color, with a hover card carrying their title, department and email address, and the boxes drawn on the page are colored by signer rather than by field type. The same workspace is used for a single document, for a template, where a layout placed once carries onto every document generated from it, and for mass signing, where it states that each merged copy goes to one person. The side rail is editable, so a participant can be assigned or changed and the notification lists added to without going back to the document, and boxes whose participant has since been removed stay listed as unassigned with a note to reassign or remove them rather than disappearing from the layout.
How will this affect users?
Anyone preparing a document, a template or a mass signing job for signature works on one screen with a signer list they can read.
Suggested Signature Field Placement, an Undo Button and a Live Save Status
Reference #: 260916.300.0008
VISDOM can suggest where the signature fields belong by reading the document's own text lines, so a suggestion only ever falls on a line that genuinely exists in the document, and the whole batch can be accepted or reversed together. Every change on the Signature fields screen is written as it is made, which is why the screen deliberately has no Save button, and the toolbar says Saving and then All changes saved so the state of the work is never in doubt. An Undo button reverses the last action, whether that was placing, moving, resizing, changing the settings of or deleting a field.
How will this affect users?
Anyone laying out signature fields can reverse a mistake and can see that their work has been saved.
Mass Process Jobs: Create, Configure, Run and Monitor
Reference #: 260916.300.0010
Mass Process Jobs, under Administration then Templates & Presentation, covers a whole job on one screen: pick the record area and the document template, then work through numbered steps for records, participants, terms and review before running. All three kinds of job run, merge only, merge and sign, and merge and acknowledge. A merge and sign job now works out its signers from each record it merged for, taking the counterparty contacts on that record and narrowing them by the job's participant rules, rather than asking the template's own signature flow; a job built on a template with no flow previously merged every document and sent nothing. Each participant receives their own package on their own copy of the document, so no contact opens a document carrying somebody else's signature, and a record whose signature route resolves to nobody is merged but not sent and is reported in the run result rather than starting an empty package. Running a job a second time now asks you to confirm before anything happens; previously a stray click merged another copy of the document onto every matching record and emailed every signer again, with nothing on the screen to say the job had already been run.
The rules that decide which records and which participants a job covers are built in the page rather than in a pop up, with nested groups combined by ALL or ANY, a searchable field catalog, value pickers for drop-down fields, a live count of how many records currently match and a view of the rule as it will be saved. Rules created in the previous version reopen for editing with their field, operator and value already filled in, and a rule the builder cannot represent opens in a plain text box with a warning that it will be kept exactly as it is rather than being quietly rewritten. A results screen then lists every document the job produced with its record, its published version and its approval or signature state, with status counts, Complete and Finalize, and Excel, CSV and PDF exports.
How will this affect users?
End users are not affected as only System Administrators with the document template permission can reach this screen; where the module license or that permission is missing, the screen says which of the two it is rather than showing a blank page.
My Assignments: Everything Waiting on You in One List
Reference #: 260916.300.0011
My Assignments, now in the main menu under Approvals & Signatures as well as in the account menu, lists every approval and every signature waiting on you or on a group you belong to, across every record type your administrator has set up for approval and signature processes, rather than keeping approvals and signatures on separate lists. A tab for each record type carries a count of what is outstanding, so the screen answers where your work is before a list has loaded, and it opens on the type that has something in it, or on the tab you last used. An Outstanding only filter is new. Opening an item takes you to the signing portal, where the documents are read and the decision is made.
How will this affect users?
Anyone who approves or signs documents can see all of their outstanding work in one place instead of opening records one at a time.
Merge Placeholders Can Be Copied With a Click, and Are Suggested as You Type
Reference #: 260916.300.0013
Every merge placeholder shown in Contract Insight is now a click to copy chip, with a tooltip carrying the exact placeholder and a brief confirmation on the chip once it has been copied. This covers the template workbench grids and drawers, the Mergeable Clauses screens and their live previews, the field list on a notification message and the example placeholders inside the hint sentences on record emails and workflow alerts. Notification message authoring is unchanged, because clicking a placeholder there inserts it at the cursor. In the template document editor, typing an opening brace opens a suggestion list at the cursor showing the placeholders this template really holds, filtered as you type, and accepting one replaces exactly what you typed. The full placeholder reference, with its search, grouped list and Copy all, is now available from a button in the document editor's header as well as in the workbench, so placeholders can be looked up while the document is being written.
How will this affect users?
End users are not affected as only System Administrators author templates. Template authors can copy a placeholder exactly rather than retyping it.
Choosing a Template on a Record Now Shows What the Document Will Contain
Reference #: 260916.300.0014
Choosing a template in a record's Documents area now opens the optional clause chooser with it, rather than leaving it behind a separate button, because what a document contains is part of choosing the template. Clauses are listed one per line with the count and a summary such as "2 of 2 included" in the heading, and a chevron beside a clause title expands its published wording in place, read from the same version the merge will insert, with its merge placeholders left in so it is clear which parts will be filled from the record. A clause with no published version says so, which immediately reveals a clause that would have been included and inserted nothing. The document's name has moved out of the toolbar, where only the opening characters of a long name were visible, into a Saving as line with a pencil that opens a full width field.
A template whose file cannot be merged is tagged in the picker, and selecting it leaves Generate and Generate & Save switched off carrying the reason. While a document is being generated, a status message appears immediately at the top right of the screen, stays visible as a long record is scrolled, can be dismissed, and updates the moment the work finishes, at which point the record's file list refreshes on its own so the new document appears without reloading the page.
How will this affect users?
Anyone generating a document from a record can see what it will contain, what it will be saved as and how the generation is progressing.
Word, PDF, Spreadsheet and Internally Built Templates All Produce Documents
Reference #: 260916.300.0019
Document generation now works from the template file's own type, so all four kinds of template produce a document. On a PDF template, each merge item already positioned on a page is painted onto it, and a placed field resolves linked values, date differences and masks the same way it does in a Word template; those positions are kept through the upgrade and are carried forward when a new version of that file is published. New positions cannot be added to a PDF template in this release, so a PDF that carries none is marked merged as-is on its row in the template's file list, in its own file settings and again in the template picker on a record, where the outcome is stated before Generate is pressed; both Generate and Generate & Save stay available, because producing that file unchanged is the correct result rather than a failure. Where merge values have to fall in particular places on a page, build the template as a Word file, which merges its fields wherever they are typed, and set that Word template to convert to PDF if a PDF is what the reader should receive. Spreadsheet templates fill the placeholders typed into their cells, and where one worksheet is protected the rest of the workbook still merges instead of the whole generation failing. Word templates set to convert to PDF hand back a PDF, with document locking applied where the template asks for it. Documents assembled inside Contract Insight are converted using the same document engine the rest of the product uses, which removes a separately licensed third party component from the installation; the author's page break marker becomes a genuine Word page break, and a section that cannot be converted falls back to its own text instead of failing the document. Where a template holds several document files and is not set to append them into one, every file is now produced as a separate document under a single package, in template order, whether the documents are generated from the record, by a workflow or by a mass process job.
How will this affect users?
Anyone whose templates are not Word files, or whose templates hold more than one document, now gets every document the template describes.
The Merged Document Page Is One Page of Sections
Reference #: 260916.300.0022
A generated document is managed on one page of collapsible sections rather than through a stepper, a side rail, tab strips and pop-up overlays. The same eight views are present in the same order and grouping, and the settings screens open as side panels, so two of them can be read at once. The package can be named when it is created, prefilled from the template, and renamed with a hover pencil. The file list reads File, Published, Type and Status, with the file name shown in full and acting as the download link for the published version, the drop zone for adding a file sitting above the list, and the guidance text written for whoever has to deal with a file readable as a tooltip on the row, with a marker showing which rows carry one. Info, Preview, Upload new version and Attach to the record are on the row, with versions, download, check out, check in and delete behind the row menu. A merged file can be read in the shared previewer from this page, where previously the only way to see what it said was to download a copy.
Attach to the record puts a package file's published version onto the record as an ordinary attachment, with versioning, categories, search and the audit trail, and unlike the previous version it does not check the file out and leave it locked. It is the route to sending one document into a joint document process, which only ever works on record attachments, and to signing a single file on its own. A History section lists who changed the generated document and when, which is a different question from the merge trail that records what filled each placeholder; file level actions such as check in, delete and attach are recorded there as well, where they were previously invisible.
How will this affect users?
Anyone working with a generated document reaches every view and every everyday file action without moving between navigation devices.
Approvals and Signatures on the Merged Document Page
Reference #: 260916.300.0023
The manage page for a generated document now carries full Approvals and Signatures sections built from the same components the record's panel uses, so the two screens always agree, and both Set up approval process and Send for signatures are available here. Where a document has approvals or signatures switched off, the section is still shown with an explanation in place of the runtime rather than being hidden. A Processes on this document section lists every approval and signature process ever raised on it, whether pending, running, completed, rejected or canceled, with a link from each running one to its console; the Approvals and Signatures sections show only the live process, so a canceled attempt or a finished round previously had nowhere to appear.
The approval or signature flow copied onto a generated document can also be edited on that document alone: add, change or remove groups and participants without touching the template every future document is built from. A participant can be corrected in place, including their title, the reason they are involved and whether they are required, where previously a typo meant deleting the person and adding them again. Participants the template marked as locked cannot be dropped from a single document, a title fixed by the template because a signature field is bound to it stays locked while the reason can still be changed, and once the process has started the running process is authoritative and edits are refused with a banner explaining why.
How will this affect users?
Anyone managing a generated document can start, watch and correct its routing without returning to the record, and without affecting every future document from that template.
Long Documents Open Page by Page on the Signing Screen
Reference #: 260916.300.0040
The signing screen now draws each page as the reader reaches it, rather than preparing the whole document before anything appears, and the rail of page thumbnails fills almost immediately. Jumping to a page part way through a long document fetches that page instead of everything between, and a document that has been opened once opens faster the next time. Measured on CobbleStone's own test system, an eighty nine page package that took thirty four seconds to appear opened in under ten seconds on a first visit, in about a second on a return visit, and a jump to page sixty landed in under two seconds. The tools for placing a signature stay unavailable for the moment it takes the sender's own placed fields to arrive, so a field can no longer be placed in the instant before the authored layout loads and then be overwritten by it.
How will this affect users?
Signers and approvers opening a long document wait for the page in front of them rather than for the whole document.