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.
  • Icertis Experience for Salesforce
    • Enhancing Upload Document action with validation messages.

• Enhancements to Business Applications 
  • Sourcing
    • Providing advances optimization for RFx.
  • Obligation Management
    • Introducing the Obligation Management navigation tile as an entry point for managing all Obligations and Fulfillments.
  • Risk Management
    • Certifying the ICI Risk Management application to work with the 7.17 release.
  • Proposal Management
    • Certifying the ICI Risk Management application to work with the 7.17 release.

• 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.

• Refer to the Technical Requirements for the release in this document. 
• Refer to the Wiki documentation for details of all ICI features and functionalities. 
• Partners and Icertis internal teams can access the Icertis Software Development Kit content through TechConnect. 

ICI Application Enhancement Details

920876 – Supporting rich documents preview using WOPI technology

The document preview has now been enhanced to provide the rich preview experience using the WOPI for office technology. This rich preview is available for agreements, associated documents and attributes files appearing on various UI pages.
With the WOPI for office, users can now preview MS Excel and presentation files types. Whereas, the existing supported file formats such as images, .pdf, .doc and .docx will continue to use the current technical solution to generate previews.
Using the WOPI for office, the files can be previewed entirely without limiting the number of pages in a preview. Configurators can enable the WOPI for office to preview documents independent of the online editing functionality settings through the technical configuration.

916373 – Supporting localization for Attribute values of Associations

ICI extends its localization to attributes of association entities tagged in templates and agreements to display values in a local language. 
This localization support has been provided for association entities assembled as a file, table or saved search in a single as well as bilingual template. The localization covers data types such as Masterdata lookup (String Attribute), Choice/Multi-choice, Date and DateTime, Percentage, Number, Boolean and Currency, as well as attribute groups and extension attributes on ICI UI.
On a different note, users can now tag these data types for associations using Icertis Experience for Word.
When the localization is not defined, the attribute values will be displayed in a language depending on specific business criteria (need to confirm with Bala if this needs to be mentioned in RN). To apply the localization in ICI, Administrators should maintain the translation values against respective resource keys using the Translation Editor tool.

732505 – Ability to create and edit associated documents in Icertis Experience for Word

An agreement contract usually contains number of associated documents. While working on an agreement, it is now possible to create and edit these associated documents within the Icertis Experience for Word itself, similar to the editing of agreements. This provides the unified experience while working with agreement and its components while improving the productivity and efficiency. 

• When creating or editing associated documents of an agreement in the Icertis Experience of Word, users can:
• View and access the existing associated documents of an agreement.
• Select the association contract type.
• Tag association-based attributes, clauses and signatories.

Send an association for approval. A version of associated document is created in the ICI on saving or publishing the associated document from Icertis Experience of Word. The authorization workflow will start for the workflow enabled associated document. The actions taken on the associated document from the Icertis Experience of Word will be captured and can be viewed under the History tab on the ICI UI.

This support is only available for the creation of drag/drop type of associations and editing the template based and drag/drop type of associations in .docx file format.

822057 – Supporting Online Editing for Associated Documents

ICI API Enhancement Details 

928354 – Support for Introspection endpoint validation method 

Previously in API 2.0, support was provided for signed JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). However, not every identity provider (IDP) integration can provide signed JWT’s and they rely on different mechanisms, such as Introspection endpoint, for token validation. This led to issues while providing OAuth as a mechanism to authenticate with ICI API’s.

With this release: 

• OpenID Connect (OIDC) has been implemented as per the IdP Introspection endpoint for validation of tokens. The non-JWT Access token (RFC 6749) will be validated with the Introspection endpoint provided by the IDP. The introspection endpoint is solely responsible for deciding whether API requests will succeed.
• Support added for Okta, Ping Identity and Ping Federate as standard IDP’s.

The Introspection endpoint accepts an opaque access token and returns a set of claims associated to the access token. In this mechanism, the consuming application does not require to validate tokens locally and can validate all types of tokens issued by the IDP.

Note: In API 2.0, the JWT Token Validation Handler will always take precedence over token Introspection.

1000772 – Ability to specify template during agreement creation

A new endpoint has been provided for template rule evaluation which returns a list of applicable templates after template rule evaluation.
Users will now be able to upload the template while creating/updating agreement using API.  The new create/update APIs also support auto-selecting applicable template when only one template is returned after rule evaluation.
 

1019565 – API Support for BACT

The support for Bulk Association Contract Type (BACT) from API 2.0 was earlier not possible. Client integrations using API 2.0 were not able to create, update, edit, delete BACT entities, hence they were compelled to use API 1.0 API and do a hybrid (1.0 & 2.0) to cover integration use cases.
With this release, to ensure seamless experience for our customers, CRUD support has been enabled for the Create, Update, Delete, and Get endpoints. Thus, customers no longer need to use API 1.0.
 

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

973340 – Improving Clause delineation in DiscoverAI

The Discover AI’s clause delineation logic has been improved further to discover the clause boundaries more accurately in a docx, text pdf, scanned pdf and mixed docx document. 
The clauses in these documents will be delineated based on the clause titles to identify up to one level of sub clause(s) in conjunction with the existing visual indentation based clause delineation logic. For example, while identifying the clause category, the entire text under title Introduction is identified as a clause. The DiscoverAI will follow the clause delineation method that will be more suitable to the specific document file format to give more accurate clause identification. The title-based delineation is only supported when working in English language.
This will help to accurately identify clauses in the document and also reduce the number of incorrectly identified clauses. 
This service is available automatically for users with DiscoverAI license and no further configuration is required.

973364 – Rules engine enhancement

973366 – Enhancing the out-of-the-box model in DiscoverAI

The Discover AI has been improved to discover out-of-the-box attributes, clauses and obligations with high accuracy. 
The recall and precision with which the attributes are identified in documents are now upto 95% accurate. The list of the 15 out-of-the-box attributes whose discovery has been improved using the rule engine is mentioned below. 

• ICMPartyName
• ICMPartyAddress
• ICMEffectiveDate
• ICMExpiryDate
• ICMContractValue
• ICMContractDuration
• ICMRenewal
• ICMPaymentTerms
• ICMJurisdiction
• ICMGoverningLaw
• ICMTerminationPeriod
• ICMCity
• ICMState
• ICMCountry
• ICMZipCode
   

973385 – Provision of the ability to read the wet signature and the rubber stamp print in documents

Discover AI now adopts the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology embedded into ICI to read the wet signatures and rubber stamp prints present in the document.
The enhancements offered per document type are listed below.

• Scanned PDF
  • Addition of a flag to decide the use of Read API, OCR Service or Tile OCR.
  • Ability to convert PDF to text similar to the existing pipeline with READ API.
  • Ability to identify handwritten text/wet signatures in documents.
  • Splitting documents if it exceeds the threshold pages numbers and size.
  • Supporting multi column Documents.
• Text PDF
  • Addition of a flag for text conversion using Document Convertor or Read API.
• Table Discovery
  • Discovering tables using Azure form recognizer by default.
     

575477 – Analyzing associated documents in AI Studio

AI studio extends its capability of analyzing documents in bulk to provide the insightful data, to the associated documents and amendments. User can now include amendments and associations along with parent agreements to process together and discover attributes, tables, obligations and clauses.
ICI provides the options to:

• List all document entities associated with an agreement at the agreement level.
• Manually trigger discovery on one or more selected entities
• View the discovered attributes, clauses, obligations and clauses in the form of interactive power BI dashboard with the actionable interface
• Save the discovered attributes values in respective agreement, association or amendment
• Create associations from the tables discovered in other associations or amendments.
• Create obligation instances from the obligations discovered in associations or amendments.

Reports Enhancement Details

865062 – Introducing Obligation Management Summary Report

The Obligation Management Dashboard and Obligation Management Health reports provide specific reporting techniques for business executives to track and monitor obligations and fulfillments. 
With this release, the Obligation Management Summary is being introduced in addition to the OM reporting offerings in ICI, to support business performance monitoring by analyzing performance of obligations and tying them to business metrics. 
The out-of-the-box OM report will be available in the Reports section under “Default Reports > Obligation Management” section. It can be accessed from the Dashboard option under the OM App navigation tile as well.

Similar to other reports, this OM Report can be configured via Security Groups for users to have View, Manage and None accesses.

971908/975186/1002911/1002912/1002913/1002914/1002916/1002917/1002918 – Adding core reports to Platform Analytics

Previously 6 core SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) based reports were made available as part of Platform Analytics in Power BI report form: Agreements Pending Approval Report, Agreements Pending Execution Report, Expired Agreements Report, Expiring Agreements Report, Signature Type Report and User Login Report.
With this release, the following reports are also being added to Platform Analytics:

• Agreement Deviation Report
• Approved Requests Waiting for Contract Creation Report
• Clause Profiling Report
• Clauses Pending Approval Report
• Template Clause Report
• Templates Pending Approval Report
• CLM Activity Report

Any new Power BI reports created by editing existing reports will be listed under My Reports for the user and under Custom Reports section when shared with other users in the org. A new Security Group Privilege has been provided for Power BI Reporting – the users of the security group which has manage access to this privilege can edit these default Power BI reports.

Integration Enhancement Details

1008388 – Workday masterdata sync for HCM

This release introduces masterdata sync for Employment Agreements. Now the ICI Workday integration supports:

• The ability to interface Organizations from Workday to ICI
• The ability to interface Job Profiles from Workday to ICI 
• The ability to interface Workers from Workday to ICI   
   

804682 – Displaying validations when uploading documents in Salesforce

While previously users could upload documents to the Icertis Experience for Salesforce, there was no validation in place for the type of documents to be uploaded. With this release, the following validations have been put in place to avoid any file from being uploaded and avoiding any potential risk for customer business:

• Invalid File Type
• Older Version Validation
• Add/Remove/Modify Content control and upload
• Association as file/table Added/Modified/Deleted and differences
• Missing mandatory/parent clause, clause modified/removed/added
• Incorrect format for the tagged attributes
• Invalid document
• Exact same
• Virus Scan
• Invalid lookup values

Business Apps Enhancement Details

ICI Sourcing Application

The 7.17 Release introduces significant enhancements to the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) Sourcing Business Application (SRC7.17.0.X).

213222 – Advanced Optimization for RFx

Sourcing events often include many line items, participating suppliers, and multiple rounds of negotiations. The number of bids received for an RFx often gets humongous making it difficult for the buyers to analyze them. Buyers often must analyze the bids externally thereby not providing any visibility on the analysis and the outcome in ICI Sourcing.
With this release, buyers can now create multiple scenarios for an RFx. Buyers can run optimization on an RFx based on the created and defined scenarios and view the award recommendations.
Now,

• ICI prevents buyers from cancelling RFx that are in “Draft” state.
• ICI displays a confirmation message when buyers cancel RFx that are in “Approved” state. 

ICI Obligation Management Application 

The 7.17 Release introduces enhancements to the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) Obligation Management Application (OM7.17.0.X).

521025 – Introducing the Obligation Management Navigation Tile

With this release, a dedicated Obligation Management navigation tile is being introduced as a single starting point to triage and monitor all obligations and fulfillments, and track obligation compliance, with the help of the following options: 

• Dashboard: This is the obligation dashboard displaying a comprehensive report view of obligations and fulfillments across various analytics.
• All Obligations: This opens up the list view of Obligations per the predefined saved search displaying all the existing obligations in the app. It displays all the obligations associated with respective agreements that the user’s role has access to view and/or manage. Users will be able to filter and search for desired obligations in this Obligation index page.
• All Fulfillments: This opens up the list view of Fulfillments per the predefined saved search displaying all the existing fulfillments in the app. It displays all the fulfillments associated with respective obligations that the user’s role has access to view and/or manage. Users will be able to filter and search for desired fulfillments in this Fulfillments index page.
• My Fulfillments: This is the user-specific fulfillments that they are directly involved in or assigned with as part of their tasks, being a member of the team/s with specific roles. The Fulfillment Owner or Fulfillment Approver, who is part of the team for a fulfillment record, will see their respective list of fulfillments, per their role, through this tile option.

ICI Risk Management Application

ICI Risk Management application is certified to work with the 7.17 release (RM7.17.0.X).

ICI Proposal Management Application 

ICI Risk Management application is certified to work with the 7.17 release (RM7.16.0.X).

Partner Enablement

Upgrading Icertis Software Development Kit for Partner Enablement

Icertis develops strategic partnerships to drive shared business growth, deliver quality implementations, and maximize customer satisfaction. The Software Development Kit (SDK) was introduced to provide the resources and tools needed while implementing ICI.

Technical Requirements for Release 7.16

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:

Known Issues

This section includes some issues that we are aware of and plan to resolve at the earliest:

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 |