Revision as of 11:54, 12 August 2021

ICI Release Notes - Release 7.17

List of Enhancements 7.17

The 7.17 Release introduces significant enhancements to the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform. Key enhancements include new AI and Analytics capabilities, User Experience updates, and Localization features.

The enhancements of this release include:

Enhancements to the ICI Application
- User Experience
  - Providing a rich preview for agreements, associated documents and attributes documents on various UI pages by implementing the WOPI for Office Apps technology.
  - Extending the online editing in ICI to cover editing Associated Documents along with the agreements in shared online sessions to provide a complete collaboration encompassing the components of agreements.
  - Provision to create and edit associated documents when working on an agreement within the Icertis Experience for Word.
  - Extending the localization support to the Associated Document’s attributes tagged in an agreement as a file, table or saved search and Bilingual Template in Association.

Enhancements to ICI API 2.0
- Adding new API endpoints to receive audit logs, to specify templates during agreement creation and to support bulk association contract types.
- Announcing deprecated APIs and their provisioned alternatives.

Enhancements to Artificial Intelligence Applications
- Capability to include the associated documents and amendments along with parent agreements to process together in the AI Studio and provide the insightful data.
- Improving the Discover AI’s clause delimitation logic to discover the clause boundaries accurately based on the clause titles and identify up to one level of sub clauses in a .docx, text .pdf or scanned .pdf or mixed .docx document.
- Adopting the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology embedded into ICI to read the wet signatures and rubber stamp prints present in the document using Discover AI.
- Improving the Discover AI’s accuracy for recall and precision for identifying attributes in documents for the list of out-of-the-box attributes.

Enhancements to Reports
- The Obligation Management Power BI dataset “Obligations & Fulfillments” is now available for OM Reports without having the need for “Advance Analytics” installed.
- Merging a range of Power BI reports within the ICI core reporting, enabling users to leverage Microsoft Power BI capabilities for customized report creation.

Improving the Icertis Experience
- Icertis Experience for Workday
  - Introducing integration of human capital management in the ICI Workday integration.
- Signature Workflow
  - Improving the electronic signature process when using Adobe Sign to provide a unified, flexible signature workflow. This hybrid (manual and/or electronic) signature process enables users to add, modify and/or tag signatories, change signatory sequence and specify authentication methods for the signatories.
  - Providing the ability to send associated documents for signature along with agreements when using Adobe Sign.
  - Increasing the text limit for email subject lines to 255 characters, when sending documents for signature using Adobe Sign.
  - Providing users the flexibility to update effective and expiry dates while uploading the manual signed copy of an agreement/amendment.
- Icertis Experience for MS CRM
  - Enhancing the Icertis Experience for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to improve user experience.
- Icertis Experience for Generic Integrations
  - Enhancing file and ASB based integrations to support provisioning, deprovisioning and reprovisioning both internal and external users.
  - Enhancing SFTP based integrations to support inbound integration for agreement, amendment and association entities.

Enhancements to Platform Tools
- Enhancing ICI Promote to Production (P2P) framework to allow Administrators to promote configuration on different ICI patch versions for a major release (assuming no schema changes). Also enhanced robustness of the tool with provisions for automated fixes for known P2P validation errors, better display of progress status and ability to resume P2P activity from the last successful step in ICI UI.

Enhancements to Business Applications
- Sourcing
  - Introducing One-Click Download on Download Package window, enabling users to download specific files relevant to a RFx in a single click.
- Risk Management
  - Certifying the ICI Risk Management application to work with the 7.16 release.
- Obligation Management
  - Introducing the Obligation Library, providing users the ability to automatically create obligations.

Additions to Icertis Software Development Kit for Partner Enablement
- With this release, the following SDK documents have been updated: ICI Technical Configuration Hooks and Self-Serve Tools.

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

ICI Application Enhancement Details

704597 – Extending inline association support for contract request and introducing file drop functionality in inline association

ICI enables users to create association instances as part of agreement creation or update wizard. When creating or updating an agreement or amendment, users can create, view, or delete inline associations.
With this release, this inline associations functionality has been extended to contract request create/update wizard as well. The users can create, view or delete associations while creating or updating the contract requests.
On a separate note, a file drop zone similar to the one in agreements, has been made available on the contract request details page for the configured associated document. This file drop functionality has also been extended to inline associations grid in agreement as well as contract request creation wizard. The inline association functionality now supports dynamic associations for agreements, amendments and contract requests.

421708 – Extending preview support for additional file formats

As a part of our upgrading and upscaling process, the document preview facility has been extended to support custom file selection attributes appearing on the various UI screens. Users can now preview documents uploaded through custom and system file selection attributes as an entity goes through workflows stages, for easy and quick reference.
Furthermore, it is now possible to preview associated documents in .ppt, .pptx, .msg and image file formats (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif) along with .docx and .pdf documents. This saves efforts for business users downloading multiple documents and avoiding local copies from cluttering their system.

The preview option will now be available on the entity “Summary”, “Verify” and “Details” pages for system and custom file path attributes in addition to the “Preview” available from the left navigation pane.
Administrators can configure an option to preview the entire document or limit the number of pages through technical configuration. Preview for large files is not available.

842776 – Enhancements to the Legacy Upload tool

To improve usability and the user experience for our customers, the following enhancements have been made to the “Legacy Upload” tool:

Enhanced the User Interface for better usability and self operation mode.
Provided support of selecting the required attributes from the attribute select columns with pre-populated mandatory attributes, along with extended entity attributes.
Enabled single-click self-generation of workbook to reduce the number of steps in the process.
Provided support for uploading the peer association entity so that they can be uploaded along with existing association of the main agreement and ensure there is no manual work post legacy upload.
Enabled support for Linkage Type to define proper contractual relationship between different records.
Provided support for uploading records in various states (such as “Terminated”, “Expired”) so that the user does not have to reinitiate the workflow and move it manually to these states.
Capability to support the sub-folders structure so that the segregated document structure is followed in ICI as well.
Added validation and error messages across ICI that will help users rectify issues themselves quickly and reduce dependency on technical teams.
Capability to process a failed batch again with the corrected records.
Provided ability to schedule the batch upload frequency using a configuration key to reduce dependency on the database team.
Enabled email notification on the batch initiation and completion to the concerned recipient.

817886 – Enhancing dual language template capability in ICI

ICI provides the capability to configure a template in two languages which helps to reduce or eliminate the language barrier and communicate better with regional customers. The capability is now further enhanced to support the rule-based assembly of primary and its equivalent localized secondary clauses in the bilingual template.
Business users can define a template as dual-language and set the template’s primary and secondary languages with the language specific date and time formats. Tagged rule-based clauses will be assembled in both languages of a bilingual template on a single ruleset.

When a user replaces a primary clause with its alternate clause either from the UI or Icertis Experience for Word, the corresponding secondary clause will also get replaced with its respective alternate clause. Any modification in the standard text of primary or secondary clauses will trigger the standard deviation workflows.

791889 – Supporting localized values on user interface as per logged in user’s language

ICI now extends its localization support to status/business statuses, choice/multi-choice attributes, signature sequence, among other elements as per language preference set by the logged in user.
Adapting existing products to new markets through translation and localization is the key to global growth. The localized versions of the product improve the overall user experience and help to better connect with new and potential global customers. In order to achieve this, ICI now extends its localization support to below mentioned UI components to display them in a logged in user’s preferred language:

Status and Business Status
Type of paper
Signature Type and Signature Sequence
Contract Type Choice and Multi-choice attributes
Contract Type Description
Search and default text
Notification Category and Events on Notifications Dashboard

Administrators can enter the translated values for these elements in the local language using ICI’s “Translations Editor” tool.

Business users can see localized values as per their preferred language settings.

The UI elements will be displayed in English if there are no local values available in the system for that specific element.

863795 – Support for context-based translations in ICI

The same value/term in English appearing on multiple pages across ICI might have different meanings based on the context of the page on which it is used and the purpose for which it is used. For example, the word “home” is translated as “Zuhause” in German, whereas in the context of “home page” it is translated as “Startseite”.
Previously, the same resource key was used for the same term appearing on multiple pages across ICI, whereas the translation of the term differed depending on the context in the different areas of ICI.
With this release, the resource keys are split based on the respective context so that corresponding translated terms appear in the localized ICI version.

Note: The resource values have not been changed in the context of the language in the current release.

740579 – Provision of self-serve data management tool

Moving one step ahead in the self-service, ICI now allows performing data management activities for entities in all workflow stages.
The data management activities introduced with this release are update and delete operations for Agreements, Associated Documents, Contract Requests, User Information, Files and Attributes. These self-serve data management operations will empower administrative users to troubleshoot data inconsistency issues on their own.

However, users are advised to execute these operations cautiously as the data fix does not go through necessary business validations and are performed directly in the database itself. Furthermore, updating or deleting data through the data management tool cannot be undone and will not trigger any underlying rules, workflows, notifications, triggers or integrations. Therefore, it is recommended to follow standard ICI workflows for any major or entity state modifications.
Note: The type of attributes such as Expressions, Conditional, Multi-select Lookup, Script and System will remain non editable and cannot be updated through data management tool.
By default, the Data Management utility is enabled and can be controlled through the technical configuration.

685700 – Enhancements to bulk action functionality on Saved Searches

ICI provides users the ability to perform bulk actions on saved searches to efficiently work with entities in bulk.
With this release, this bulk action on saved searches functionality provides enhanced experience as:

Performing validation checks against resubmission of in-progress records for same bulk action and display validation message.
Sending notifications upon bulk action submission and completion.
Displaying a toast message on the UI along with the bulk action initiation activity on the activity panel upon bulk action submission.

The notification contains a page link which will display the statistics of the processed records and the live updates on in-progress records.
This enhancement will be available with the upgrade and does not require any further configuration.

788412 – Enhancements to auto delegations

ICI users can delegate their tasks for situations such as when they are out of office. These delegation capabilities are now enhanced, and business users can now:

Set multi-level auto delegations
Set conditional delegations
Reorder delegation sequence

Utilizing these capabilities, users will be able to create complex delegation structures and manage their tasks more efficiently.
Multi-level delegations allow automatic delegation of user’s tasks to the next delegate in a sequence up to a third level, when the subsequent delegates have also set up delegations overlapping with the selected time period.
Conditional delegations will selectively delegate a user’s tasks to another user based on saved searches. The delegation will take effect only if the set conditions are met.
While setting multiple delegations, users can reorder the evaluation sequence to suit their needs.

The validation messages will be displayed to assist users while setting up auto delegations in cases where a similar delegation already exists, delegation dates overlap, or a delegate is already out of office, so that the user can make appropriate decisions.
Users can view the recently expired 15 delegations which they can reactivate by updating; and reuse while setting up delegations structure.
These enhancements are automatically available with the upgrade and no further configuration is required.

789103 – Enhancements to Extended User Entity to support lookup filtering

The process of selecting users on contract request now provides a support to lookup attribute as well, to avail the benefits of filtering capabilities to handle specific business scenarios.
It is now possible to filter users, such as external or internal users, using the lookup on extended user entity while working with contract requests and agreements.
The enhancements include:

Enabling multi filter Lookup for contract request and user datatype.
Filtering user type attributes as per Extended User Entity details.
Managing external users through Extended User Entity.
Migrating existing users to the Extended User Entity through script as a part of upgrade.

Note: The necessary user details must be added to the Extended User Entity masterdata through technical configuration in order to migrate the user data.

384324 – Ability to configure number of approvals required from selected ad-hoc user groups

Previously in ICI, when a user group was added as an ad-hoc approver or reviewer, all users from the added group were required to approve a document, except when added using a rule.
Users now have the ability to set the minimum approvals required from selected ad-hoc user groups to qualify the agreement as approved, thereby accelerating approval process.
In ICI, during the contract negotiation flow, authorized users can add ad-hoc approvers or reviewers to a contract’s team.

They can specify whether all or specific number of users from each selected user groups are required to approve the document. This will considerably reduce the approval cycle time and unnecessary follow ups.

The request will then be sent to all users in a group in parallel, where either a specified minimum number of users or all can approve a document to consider it as approved by that user group.
This configuration is available for:

Workflows: approver, reviewer, request review and deviation approver.
Entities: agreement, amendment, orphan amendment, contract request, association and masterdata.
Integrations: Icertis Experience for Salesforce and for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Iframe where ICI loads).
Sub-roles.
Add to Team window’s Grid and Tile views.

This enhancement is available with the upgrade and no further configuration is required.

832489 – Enhancing auto-attachment functionality to support all ADCT configurations

Users will now be able to auto-attach associated documents containing mandatory attributes as well to an agreement as this functionality is enhanced to support all associated document contract types.
The auto-attachment can now be used in obligation management as well, where users may need to instantiate and associate a predefined set of obligations to agreements. Users can automatically attach these obligations as associations to agreements and amendments based on defined event rules.
Users can now:

Define and maintain a library for Associated Document Contract Types (ADCTs) as a standard document master with all their required attributes configured.
Update and delete associated documents in a library.
Define the mapping between agreements and associated documents for auto-attachments.
Define rules and saved search to trigger the auto-attachment process for associations.
Update associations according to the modifications in the corresponding masterdata.

Note: The auto-associations functionality supports only parent child type associations.

The auto-attachment of associations is enabled through technical configuration.

688229 – Allowing configurators to setup the file selection attribute as read only

In ICI, users upload a document file using the file selection attribute. With this release, ICI provides an option to disable the user defined file selection attribute at a contract type level thereby preventing unintentional or intentional tampering with the document.
Configurators can configure the user defined file selection attribute to appear as editable or non-editable on the User Interface. This configuration can be done at agreement, amendment, association, masterdata, contract request, extended entity attributes, extension attributes and template variables level.
System can still attach a file on a non-editable file selection attribute through backend tasks or API integrations. However, users would not be able to replace or remove such original files from UI which are attached through backend task/integration.

693051 – Displaying Microsoft Word comments along with clause text for rule-based clauses in an agreement

In ICI, clause comments are displayed along with clause text while assembling a rule-based clause in an agreement, enhancing the collaborative experience among users. Clauses are tagged and assembled into templates and agreements either in a static manner or using rules. Clause authors or custodians may have added comments to clauses using MS Word markup to collaborate with other stakeholders.
With this release, clause comments will be displayed along with clause text when a clause is assembled in an agreement through rules as well, as they are displayed in case of static clauses. This will help stakeholders to collaborate efficiently while making the working of clauses consistent across ICI.

The clause comments and edits made to them will be displayed:

For rule-based clauses with or without page break.
For agreements, amendments, associations and assignments.
In the “Show Comparison” window on the entity details page.
For Word online editing of documents.

The clause comments will be displayed for clauses, tagged and assembled in agreements, with no further configuration required.

Mobile App Enhancement Details

881856 – Modifying mobile app with new theme color

As part of our new branding, the theme color of the app has been modified. This will be applied across the app on both iOS and Android.
The screens that will be modified as per the new theme color include the Login page, Dashboard, Notifications, Tasks, Commitments, Agreements, Requests, Settings, and their respective internal pages.

Note: There is no impact on the functionality or performance in iOS or Android due to this change.

ICI API Enhancement Details

807086 – APIs to support team management in associations

As part of our efforts to continually improve ICI, the following API endpoints have been added to support the team management for associations:

Add a team member to the association
Get a team of association
Remove team member from the association
Get available actions for associations
Trigger actions for associations

807101 – APIs to manage notes for ICI entities

The following API endpoints have been added to support notes operations (Add/Get) on the following entities:

Contract Request
Agreement
Masterdata
Association
User Information
Amendment

Note: Users are recommended to start using these new endpoints to perform the operations. The previous endpoints to perform notes operations on the agreement entity are being deprecated and will be removed after the next 4 releases.

819569 – APIs to Get Users based on filters applied to created or modified date

For customers with thousands of records in their database, the filtering capability has been enhanced to include time frame and security groups. GetUsers API response now features “Created Date”, “Created By”, “Modified Date”, “Modified By” fields so that filters can be applied on them for improved retrieval of data.

API Deprecation Details

With the newly introduced API endpoints, the endpoints given below have been deprecated and alternate APIs have been provisioned. These endpoints will not be available in the 5th release from the release in which they have been marked as deprecated.
Any integrations utilizing the deprecated APIs must adopt alternate APIs. More details on the alternate APIs are available in the Swagger documentation.

AI Applications Enhancement Details

826493/884672 – Introducing a training mode in AI discovery

The Discover AI in ICI presents all the new opportunities where you can selectively discover attributes, clauses, obligations and tables and keep optimizing the discovery through continuous learning from user responses.
With this release, ICI launches the capability to create your own AI Models and define the discoverable entities in them.
With the introduction of an explicit training mode, it is possible for users to train the AI model by themselves.

Users can now:
1. Define own AI Model –

Configurators can create their own AI discovery models by specifying clauses, tables, attributes, obligations they want to discover in “AI Configuration Master”. Users now have the control over configuring only the necessary and exact entities to be discovered and keep their AI models uncluttered.
Configurators can now add completely new attributes, clauses or obligations to be discovered that are not already part of the trained model.
ICI DiscoverAI will continue to offer inbuilt AI model “DiscoverAI Standard” with pre-trained set of attributes, clauses, and obligations.

2. Analyze agreements based on the AI Model –

Users now have choice to apply different AI discovery models to agreements during creation process. When discovery is triggered for a document, DiscoverAI will discover attributes, clauses, obligations and tables based on the selected AI model and using the rulesets applied in that model.

3. Train the AI Model –
For new attributes, clauses and obligation added to the AI model, user can train the AI engine such that it discovers them automatically over a period. With training mode enabled, when a user specifies an attribute value, then the user will be asked to provide the associated text from the document where this attribute value is present.
The DiscoverAI engine recognizes patterns from these user inputs and trains itself over a period of time to refine its discovery of entities.
To help Administrators to monitor the DiscoverAI’s self-learning progress, a new AI model training performance report has been introduced for each AI model defined in ICI.

The functionality is automatically available for users who have the DiscoverAI license and no further configuration is required.

575437/884668 – Introducing AI Studio to analyze multiple agreements

The evolving business dynamics have necessitated the businesses to not only be aware of their contractual risk and obligations, but also gather the intelligence from the contracts, to monetize opportunities and accelerate business.
Introducing AI Studio to facilitate the processing of documents in bulk to identify and analyze a volume of data and derive the actionable insight to use for the business advantage. Users can process the agreement documents in the ICI platform as well as those outside of the ICI platform and apply desired AI model to get the insights.
A new AI Studio tile has been introduced on the ICI UI Home page, for authorized users to run a new analysis for a set of documents against specific AI model. The AI Studio analysis supports .docx, .pdf and .zip files as document source as well as a network path or a saved search with an option to include associations. You can also add additional file sources using the customization hooks.

The analysis results are available in a summarized report form. The report displays the summary of identified attributes, clauses, tables and obligations in an interactive chart. If a user wants to deep dive into a specific document, then the report provides an option where user can view the discovered entities alongside the original file.

The AI Studio is an additional SKU and DiscoverAI, NegotiateAI, Obligation Management App and advanced analytics are prerequisite for enabling the AI studio license.

826495 – Automating user feedback for attributes, clauses, tables and obligations

AI engine recommends discovered values to users and they select the correct values for attributes or clause or obligation category. ICI AI will now capture and learn from these user interactions and keep optimizing its discovery for derived attributes, clause categories, and obligation categories to get better recommendations in subsequent discoveries.
This functionality is available automatically for users with the DiscoverAI license and no further configuration is required.

826488 – Improving Clause delineation in AI

DiscoverAI has now enhanced its logic for clause delineation to identify clause boundaries correctly.
It now supports mixed formatted .docx files along with Word and PDF documents. The document objects which are in the agreement document but not necessarily a part of the clause text such as table of content, titles, headers, footers, and multiple signature blocks, will now be identified separately and excluded from the actual clause discovery process. The discovery support for languages other than English has also been improved considerably.
These enhancements help to get better clause delineation, eliminates a large number of incorrectly classified clauses, and allows users to review the parent clause and their child clauses.
This functionality is available automatically for users with DiscoverAI license and no further configuration is required.

Reports Enhancement Details

514593 – Introducing the Tagged Attributes Report

769602 – Displaying clause extension attribute summary in the Clause Summary Report

514611 – Introducing the Notifications History Report

Integration Enhancement Details

605434 – Providing a unified flexible signature process

641289 – Allowing parallel signatures using DocuSign

701825– Supporting multiple vendors for electronic signature

751651 – Publishing success/failure notification message on ASB post data sync from Salesforce

796155 – Enhancements to the data flow between Salesforce/MS CRM and ICI

674469 – Generating ICI notifications and enhancing Salesforce data sync

679797 – Supporting JWT Bearer OAuth flow in Salesforce adapter with added support for Modified By use

749083 – Supporting OAuth in the MS CRM adapter