Revision as of 08:42, 24 December 2021

ICI Release Notes - Release 8.0

Introducing ICI ACE UX

The 8.0 Release introduces significant enhancements to the User Experience (UX) via the ACE UX – an Adaptable, Customer Focused and Efficient user experience for navigating ICI.

Motivations for ACE UX

The new user interface dynamically adapts to the Contract Intelligence paradigm and enables the platform to scale with new features and data, while maintaining a delightful interface which is more intuitive and configurable.

The revamp aims at driving usability and user adoption while maintaining the general ICI contract lifecycle actions that are widely consumed by ICI users across businesses, industries and verticals.

Key Changes in ACE UX

ICI ACE UX offers the following changes:

General Look and Feel

• Streamlined Responsive Interface offers more space for contract data and insights
• Consistent experience across the application for faster User Adoption
• All popups have been replaced by drawers to make more room for data
• Icons have been replaced with descriptive text for enhanced readability

Home Page Dashboard

• A single highly configurable dashboard type which can host KPIs, Graphic Reports, Searches and Links to bring the right data to the user’s fingertips

Agreement View

• Agreement-specific Dashboards with embedded reports, related terms, and documents to reduce the need for navigation
• Split View Preview and Word Online Editing for easy collaboration
• Agreement status chevron to easily track the progress of agreements

Agreement Index page

• Updated positions and grouping of actions for quicker access
• Search and filtering functionality updated to find documents more quickly

Entity creation

• New single click Create Workbench to access all create actions (agreements, templates, users, etc.)
• Drag-and-drop agreement creation and update, and addition of associated documents
• Create wizard look and feel updates while maintaining existing flows

Other'enhancements in the 8.0 release include:

Enhancements to Artificial Intelligence Applications

• ACE UX updates for Discover AI and AI Studio offerings
• Improvements to clause delineation and attribute discovery

Enhancements to Reports

• Platform Analytics Reports UI and Functionality have been enhanced with ACE UX capabilities

Improving the Icertis Experience

• The Icertis Experience for Salesforce and Icertis Experience for Microsoft Dynamics CRM have been updated to work seamlessly with ACE UX.

These release notes provide an overview of the enhancements to ICI, the ICI experience for integrations, and so on.

• Refer to the Technical Requirements for the release in this document.
• Refer to the Wiki'documentation (also found in your ICI help section) for details on all ICI features and functionalities.

ACE UX Enhancement Details

Overall Look and Feel

The ICI user interface has been revamped to provide more personalizability, better consistency, more room for contract data, and reduced navigation needs. These include:

• Updated UX elements which provide more room for contract data and consistent UX patterns across ICI experiences to enable faster adoption.
• Persistent headers on each page for users to readily identify the current page while navigating through various locations in ICI.
• Collapsible menus to hide or show main menu tiles and left navigation panes.
• All pop-ups have been replaced with drawers for more space for content, and consistency in user experience.
• The tile view for user and clause selection pop-ups, records layouts, saved searches and smart links has been converted to the modern UI design.
• Actions have been grouped to be easily noticeable and accessible with fresh, sleek controls and a familiar flow.
• All validation messages and pop-up messages (such as error, help, warning and similar messages) are displayed as toast notifications at the bottom right corner of the UI.
• The ICI UX is compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to enable ICI for all users.

Home Page and Dashboard

The landing page in ICI now has sleek, fresh, and personalizable modules to give users a quick and comprehensive view of the contract activities which are most relevant to them. 

Navigation and Menus

While retaining the tiles representing the different entities within ICI, the entire tiles bar has now been made into a collapsible unit, allowing users more visual space.

The Configure (previously Configuration) and Admin (previously User Administration) tiles, along with Business App tiles continue to provide a sub-menu drop-down for additional actions. The ICI Configure and Admin menu items are now grouped to be more intuitive.

Each entity tile, viz. Agreements, Requests, Associations, Compliances, Templates, Clauses along with Reports, Advanced Analytics and Bulk Actions navigate users directly to the respective ICI area.

The menu options at the top-right of the UI have been upgraded to incorporate user actions. A bell icon indicates Notifications where a red dot signifies new/unread messages and clicking this icon directs the user to the Notifications Dashboard. A user-and-time icon indicates the Activity Panel, which opens a drawer and can be refreshed to reflect the latest activities.

While the Help link (question icon) continues to open in another tab, clicking the User Settings icon opens a drawer menu for users to update their preferences.

Dashboard

The modern widget-based dashboard can easily be configured to suit users’ needs and retains the configurability of the widget-based dashboard while giving a modern visual appeal.

The new Dashboard contains the following updated elements:

• A quick links section – “What would you like to do?” – with shortcuts to directly take actions such as “Create Agreement”, “View Agreements” or even links to external sources. This enables organizations to keep the highest priority content front-and-center for all users.
• Personalized KPI tiles provide key indicators retrieved from the saved search data and Reports.
• “Saved Search” widgets which quickly show data which a user is interested in along with quick actions which can be taken on the contents. When resized down, the “Saved Search” widgets now auto-convert to KPI tiles providing more high-level information and maximizing the use of screen space.
• The “My Recent Activities” widget displays the signed-in user's recent activities while the My Tasks pull up list of Pending tasks for the user.
• Interactive graphical charts and reports powered by Advanced Analytics can also be added on the dashboard giving more insights to the user.

User can further customize the Dashboard with the “Edit Dashboard” option. They get complete configuration control on the size, placement, position of widgets, along with the colors for KPI tiles. An “Auto Arrange” option has also been provided which will automatically rearrange all the widgets on the dashboard to optimize the available space.

Administrators can configure multiple default dashboards for users by security group. However, there are seeded dashboards pre-enabled so that users will see specific common widgets even if their security group does not have a specifically configured dashboard.

The ICI seeded dashboard with the following default widgets will be displayed:

For the main Dashboard:

• Quick Action
• My Task
• Notification
• Recent Activities

For the Agreement Dashboard:

• Report
• Commitment
• Summary/Overview
• Team
• Agreement URL widget or Related Agreements
• All Associations

Create Workbench and Wizards

Create Workbench: Access create options including agreements, related content and system configuration options from a single point

The Create Workbench is a new button which provides a single location to initiate work items which saves multiple navigation clicks. The options available here are dynamically controlled based on the user permissions.

For Admins (based on permissions) this menu will also provide options such as creation of new users, groups, dashboard, masterdata, and so on:

Create Wizards

The workflows for creating and editing agreements are foundational to users and we have made multiple changes to them over the years while maintaining the overall paradigms.

With this release, creating and editing an agreement has a brand-new look that enhances the user experience. The new “Create” button on the agreement index page is going to be used as the triggering action button for approaching the creation of an agreement.

The process stage is immediately visible at the top, below the page title, with indicators of the current step. The Action Buttons persist at the bottom of window, as opposed to scrolling away with the page.

These enhancements are applicable for all the creation activities such as for requests, masterdata, contract type, security groups, and so on.

Agreement View

A number of enhancements have been introduced in the Agreements views to provide more information to users with less navigation and to make working with Agreements more streamlined and personalized. The left panel on the agreement page is now collapsible to allow more space for viewing contract data. All tabs in the panel have been enhanced per the new UI.

A new Agreement Dashboard has been introduced that displays a visual overview of the agreement and enables users to access various agreement content from a single page, saving several navigation steps. The Agreement Dashboard can be configured by an Admin by contract type and team role in the “Dashboard Configuration” page. The dashboard tab will be the default experience, but users can choose to revert to the contract “Summary” tab which is still available. Multiple out-of-the-box agreement specific widgets are available to personalize the view:

• Contract overview
• Key attributes of an agreement (for example, Expiry Date or Terms)
• Navigation widget to access reports
• All specific contract terms available in the agreement left navigation pane are available as widgets (for example, Clauses, Commitments)
• Saved Searches
• SmartLinks

The updated layout of Agreement Summary page improves readability while providing more summary content.

The Breadcrumb bar has been updated to display the document name and code to make it more meaningful.

All action buttons have been moved to the top right of the page for better visibility. Additional actions are available in the Context Menu (3-dots-icon). These are configurable by Admins via the Action Button Configuration.

The resizable split view can be used for side-by-side Preview, Online Collaboration and Compare Documents while having ready access to attributes in the left section.

Online Editing has been enhanced to open the document in full screen in the same page instead of a new tab.

An enhanced Drag-and-Drop function is now available on every page of the agreement that can create new version of agreements, and add or update versions of associations.

The chevron view has undergone a change in look and feel. It now appears in a compact view next to the status, with a link to the workflow status drawer displaying the steps of the agreement workflow.

Index Pages

The index pages across ICI have been updated with a compact look and feel, and easy access to actionable elements.

• Create action has been moved from menu tiles and is now available as a button on index pages. All secondary create actions (for example, Amendments) are available in a sub-menu of the Create button.
• The enhanced Grid View and List Views replace the Tile view.
• Columns Text in this view can be clipped or wrapped.
• All record level actions have been moved to the right and can be accessed through the “View Details” and the three-dots icon.
• The “Save View”, “Select Columns” and “Refresh” icons have been replaced with text buttons for quick visibility of the functionality.
• The position of the pagination controls has changed, wherein the page numbers are now on the bottom right and a new section displaying the current number of items on the page appears above the grid/list on the left.
• Selection of columns now supports bulk selection and drag-and-drop additions as well as reordering.

The behaviors of search options on the index pages have been updated.

• Favorite saved searches are available at the top to quickly access items most relevant to a user.
• Other saved searches are available via “More Views”.
• Filters can be opened and applied via the left filter panel.
• Each applied Filter shows as tags across the top of the search results.

Search and Filtering

The ICI Search navigation and preview functionality has been updated to provide a simpler yet more powerful search by showing both the context of the search results and also incorporating  a split preview to quickly locate documents. The Instant or Global Search option at the top of the UI shows the context of the specific result.

Users can access Advanced Search through a dedicated link (previously the Advanced Search icon) on the home page.

On opening the “Search” page, default entities are already selected and displayed with respective entity groupings. These groupings have also been rearranged to make it more intuitive and self-explanatory.

Interaction to Save a search (now Save View) has also been enhanced making it easy for users to understand.

All the existing saved views are available under “More Views”. Now users also get to pin favorites views on the Advanced Search page as well.

The scope of the enhancements, in search module like filter changes, views, save view interactions etc., is applicable to all index pages, for example – Agreement Index Page, Associations, Advanced Search Index page and so on.

Contract Request and Association Management

In line with the modern UI changes, agreement associations and contract requests have also been revamped. Now both can be created through the “Create” button on the respective entity index page. The Create, Edit and Details view for both the entities has been also modified and aligns with the agreement look and feel.

Like agreements, the split view on the Associated Document Details page can also be used for the online editing of associations and is applicable to Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Clause and Templates

Clauses and templates are the building blocks of agreements and hold a crucial position in ICI. To enhance the experience of working with these building blocks, they have been amped up to work with the modern UI designs. As a starting point, clauses and templates can be created with the dedicated Create button on the respective entity index pages.

The template and clause creation wizards have step numbers with the current step number highlighted for immediate visibility of the process.

The preview pages of “Linked Primary Clause” and “Linked Localized Template” as well as the “Add New Team Member” link on Team tab now open the respective pages in sliding drawers as per the new UI.

Setup and Configuration

The workflow of creating contract types and other configuration elements in ICI has been aligned with the ACE UX look and feel. The Create button to the right of the contract type index page allows users to create the four basic contract types of agreement management in ICI; same is applicable for other configuration elements viz. Attributes, Rules, Clause Groups and so on.

Similar changes have been applied to the experience of working with Managing Organization, User Groups, Org Groups and Security Groups. For example, the Org Group details page has revamped UI controls such as tabs and the “Edit” button in the far right of the title bar.

All input fields and action buttons have been revamped to meet the modern UI styling, including create/save options to the top-right and text on buttons for clarity.

The Application Settings drawer display is structured with a numbered pages and with highlighted number for the current page. The theme colors in ICI have been changed to a lighter format making it more visually aesthetic, along with introduction of high contrast mode to make the system more accessible.

Role Action Mapping, Attribute Group Privileges, SLA Matrix as well as User Roles configurations have all been upgraded to work with modern UI.

There are two new configurations introduced in the Admin Section – Dashboard Configuration and Action Button configuration.

Dashboard configuration allows Administrator to configure the Main and Agreement Dashboard for the users.

Admins can maintain Multiple Landing page dashboards for various security groups. Agreement dashboard can be configured here as well – by Contract Type and team Role.

Action button configuration allows Administrators to group various related actions available at contract type level to single or multiple groups.

Based on the configuration, the actions are grouped and rendered during the life cycle of entity making it easier for user to identify and perform the related activities and processes.

ICI Mobile App Enhancement Details

1119215 - Text Search Capability in Agreement Document View in iOS

The ICI Mobile App offers a quick way to engage in contract management conveniently through a smartphone.

Without having to scroll through a long document to reach a specific clause, business users looking for a particular word or term in an agreement document can now execute a text search, when using an iPhone.

On clicking eye icon on the agreement details screen, a search icon will be displayed. Clicking the search icon, a search field and keypad will be displayed where the user will be able to enter their search terms. Users can then navigate between the search results using the arrow keys.

This enhancement will be available with the upgrade and does not require any further configuration.

AI Applications Enhancement Details

97333 – ACE UX Changes for AI Apps

The look and feel of the AI Apps has now been upgraded to the modern UX. The complete overhaul of the user interface with new styling gives a fresh and sleek look when working with all AI offerings of ICI.

With this release, a dedicated AI Insights section has been added for AI Discovery and AI Studio, which can be accessed from within an agreement for a comprehensive experience. Also, the discovered entities can now be reviewed from within the agreement Details page.

The clause reviewing experience has been enhanced in line with the new user experience, wherein the review window has been replaced by a drawer.

Previously, AI Studio capabilities for an agreement were accessible from “Document List” tab on the left navigation pane. Now they have been added under dedicated “AI studio” page under “AI Insights” section.

1104114 – Improving clause delineation in DiscoverAI

Clause delineation is an important part of working with exhaustive contract texts where, each paragraph could be part of a typical hierarchy. The distinct visual representation of clauses with sub-sections of clauses displayed in a delineated view where, for example, a clause might be a combination of multiple paragraphs forming one section.

With this release ICI has significantly improved its clause delineation discovery support for identification of clause boundaries and the clause hierarchy up to 2 levels while delineating the clauses based on clause titles, for all documents in .docx, text .pdf and scanned .pdf formats. The clause delineation support has been extended to documents in languages other than English.

This service is available automatically for users with DiscoverAI license and no further configuration is required.

1104113 – Pre-trained attributes discovery accuracy improvements

DiscoverAI supports discovery of various attributes in the agreements using pre-trained AI models. In this release, we have imbibed state-of-the-art AI technology in our DiscoverAI engine and improved the accuracy of extracting the pre-trained attributes by more than 20% on an average. This would especially help in expediting new implementations AI Apps.

This service is available automatically for users with DiscoverAI license and no further configuration is required.

Reports Enhancement Details

1036791 – Platform Analytics Reports UI and Functional Enhancement

The Platform Analytics Reports user interface (UI) has now been simplified, easy to read with improved user experience. These UI enhancements will help users to get improved experience of the reporting page, by repositioning and realigning tabs and other elements on UI.

This will help the users to visualize and analyze the data within the reports in a better way and arrive at conclusions from the report with ease.

With this release, the following enhancements are done:

• The report name is now displayed outside the Power BI window.
• Time zone is displayed along with time stamp.
• Date/Time fields in the report are displayed as per user’s locale settings.
• Additional buttons are visible at the top of the report, along with existing power BI buttons present at the bottom of the report to navigate between pages in the report.

1089207 – Enhancement to CLM Activity Report

Previously the CLM Activity Report could be filtered by the Frequency parameter (Day, Week or Month).

With this release, a new filter for Organization Unit has been added. Users can select multiple organization units for a better holistic view to derive the data for CLM activity.

Integration Enhancement Details

1097956 – Impact of Modern UI on Microsoft Dynamics CRM

With this release, ICI is revamping the user interface of within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Experience. The ICI functionality will remain as it is; however, the UI look, and feel has been changed which includes the change of buttons, fonts, and colors. The changes also include different UI elements like input elements, headers and so on.  All the UI changes are in line with the MS D365 Sales guidelines.

The modern UI changes are made to avoid regression for the end-users post upgrade to modern UI. Also, the UI changes are made for the ICI frames loading within the MS D365 Sales which includes the following pages:

• Create Contract
• View Contract
• Manage Contracts Page
• Manage Contract Requests Page

The changes in the layout are done following the MS D365 Sales guidelines, the theme is referred as blue, the title changes match with the MS D365 Sales default titles.

1097957 – Impact of Modern UI on Icertis Experience for Salesforce

With this release, ICI is revamping the user interface within the Salesforce Lighting experience. The ICI functionality will remain as it is; however, the UI look, and feel has been changed which includes the change of buttons, fonts, and colors. The changes also include different UI elements like input elements, headers and so on.  All the UI changes are in line with the Salesforce guidelines.

The modern UI changes are made to avoid regression for the end-users post upgrade to modern UI. Also, the UI changes are made for the ICI frames loading within the Salesforce experience which includes the following pages:

• Create Contract
• View Contract
• Manage Contracts Page
• Manage Contract Requests Page
• Global Search Page

The changes in the layout are done following the Salesforce guidelines. The theme is referred as blue, the title changes match with the Salesforce default titles, breadcrumb changes are done to display Salesforce breadcrumb along with ICI record name.

Technical Requirements 8.0

The Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) application can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection and a supported browser. All features may not be available in all environments.

The software and hardware requirements for the client system as well as the mobile application are listed in the table below:

Important Changes in IE11 Support:

From March 2021, Microsoft has stopped its technical support to Internet Explorer (IE) and has advised its customers to move to Microsoft Edge.

ICI will no longer support IE11. ICI will not be certified over IE11.

If customers use IE 11 then the below message will be displayed:

“You are using a browser that is not recommended to be used since it no longer supported by its OEM. The ICI support for this browser is limited for 7.16 version and will be discontinued from version 7.17 onwards. You should switch to Microsoft Edge as recommended by the OEM or any other supported browser prescribed by your organizational policy. You may contact your administrator for further information.”

Related Topics: Agreement Management | Association Management | Compliance Management | Template Management | Clause Management | Configuration | Reports | Advanced Analytics | User Administration | ICI Tools |  Icertis Business Apps | AIML | ICI Add-ins | ICI Mobile App | ICI Business Apps Release Notes | Release Notes Versions