New Features

The following features are new in this release. 

Default Filters for the Playbook

You can now set the value of the default filters in Playbook using a new custom setting, Override Playbook default filter. The filter fields inherit their values from the template properties associated with the agreement document. In the scenarios where the complete clause list is lengthy, this feature is useful for showing only the relevant clauses in the clause list for an agreement.

Controlling Check-in Options

You can control the X-Author Contracts agreement Check-in options based on the users or roles using custom permissions in Contract Management. Using this feature you can ensure that users do not perform incorrect Check-in actions on an agreement document while it is in negotiation. X-Author Contracts has following Check-in options:

• With Redlines,
• Without Redlines, and
• Final - to be signed

You can set the value of the custom permission corresponding to each of the above options in Contract Management and associate it with the user role to show or hide it. You can only assign one permission to each role and if you assign more than one permission to a role, the least restrictive option will be available to the users. Each permission inherits the permission from the previous permission in the decreasing manner as described below:

Unprotecting Agreements

You can now let your end-users unprotect the protected documents from the X-Author Contracts tab using Unprotect Document. You can configure the access to the Unprotect Document button for a user by configuring the custom permission in Contract Management and assigning it to the user role. You can ensure that only trusted user roles can unprotect an agreement document for making changes and you, as an administrator, do not have to maintain several passwords, thus enhancing security. This feature also minimizes password sharing among the users.

Tracking Changes to a Smart Field within a Smart Clause

You can now track the changes made to the value of a smart field contained within a smart clause. When you only update the smart field value in a clause and leave the clause unchanged, on check-in the Agreement Clause related list in Contract Management registers a new entry with Action as FieldChangeOnly. Using this feature you can minimize unnecessary approval requests that are triggered when only a field is modified and the clause remains unchanged. 

Reconciling Only Comment Changes to a Clause

You can now reconcile and track changes made only to the comments on a clause. The changes made to the comments exclusively are tracked separately from the changes made to the clause text. When you add a new comment or update or delete an existing comment on a clause, and check-in your document, on the reconciliation screen you will see the changes made to the comments. Also, in Contract Management, the changes made to the comments are recorded under the Agreement Clauses related list with the Action CommentsChangedOnly.

This separation of tracking the changes on comments and clauses makes it easier to run the approval process. For example, you can create an approval process for an agreement in Contract Management which is triggered only if the clause text is changed during negotiation but not when comments are updated. 

Support for User-entered Locales

You can now use user-defined locales in your agreement templates, clause templates, and template fields. This feature is available for both the versioned and the non-versioned templates. These user-defined locales are available for templates of all types, like, agreements, clauses, proposals, and billing invoices. You can define the locale and use it at the time of creating a template or while checking the template in. This feature ensures that the new locales are supported with the following X-Author Features:

• Insert Field: Field date, currency format, number fields, and precision value should be according to the locale setting of the field. Field-level locale formatting takes precedence over template-level locale formatting. This feature works with the following type of fields:
  • Inline Field
  • Smart Field
• Mark Field: Field date, currency format, number fields, and precision value should be according to the locale setting of the field. Field-level locale formatting takes precedence over template-level locale formatting.
• Update from Salesforce: Update from Salesforce supports all the locales including the out-of-the-box locale and the user-defined locales.
• Insert Clause: Clause date, currency format, number fields, and precision value should be according to the locale setting of the clause. If the clause has field-level locale formatting defined, that takes precedence over clause-level locale formatting.
  If the clause does not have a specific locale setting applied, the template locale formatting is applied. This feature works with the following type of clauses:
  • Inline Clause
  • Smart Clause
• Swap Clause: Clause date, currency format, number fields, and precision value should be according to the locale setting of the clause. If the clause has field-level locale formatting defined, that takes precedence over clause-level locale formatting.
  If the clause does not have a specific locale setting applied, the template locale formatting is applied.

Enhancements

The following section describes existing features that are changed (or are no longer supported) in this release.

Compare Agreements

X-Author Contracts provides the compare feature to compare two agreements and view what has changed between the two documents. Microsoft Word displays a new, third document in which tracked changes in the baseline document are accepted and changes in the selected document are shown as tracked changes. Compare is enhanced to support smart fields. Now you can compare two agreement versions containing smart elements except repeat elements (Repeat Table and Repeat Section).

Update Current Version with Check-in Options

When you check-in an agreement and select Update Current Version, you can now also choose any of the three available Save options. Using the enhanced check-in feature, you can now update the current version of an agreement and simultaneously check-in a document with reconciliation to save the changes made to the smart fields in the document. Earlier, both the options were mutually exclusive and if you selected Update Current Version, the Save options were disabled. 

Review Import Offline

Winter 2019 release has introduced the following enhancements for Review Import Result feature:

• When you import an offline agreement using intelligent import and then review the imported document, the Review Import Result pane now only shows the fields and clauses which are completely processed and identified by the KIRA server and those fields and clauses are marked with black color in the review pane.
• You can now untag the incorrectly tagged and marked fields and clauses in your imported document.

Hiding X-Author Actions

Winter 2019 release has introduced the ability to hide action buttons if the protection mode of the agreement is: Read Only, Fill in Form Fields, or Insert Comments. The action buttons hidden from your X-Author Contracts tab are:

• Mark Field
• Mark Clause
• Hide Smart Boundaries
• Playbook
• Promote Clause
• Control Panel: Show Fields for marking and Show clause library for marking checkbox are disabled too.