X-Author for Contracts is the latest Microsoft Word add-in that lets you work on contracts and contract templates. The X-Author for Contracts add-in provides an all-new user-friendly User Interface (UI) that helps contract administrators and/or legal users to streamline the entire process of contract life cycle management.

Using X-Author for Contracts, you can create and maintain contract documents that contain contracts, clauses, and templates. The upgraded intuitive User Interface of X-Author for Contracts aids the contract administrators in seamlessly managing complex negotiation cycles where multiple users can review the documents, make changes to the clauses and templates with ease. One of the key features of X-Author for Contracts, when compared to the classic version, is that this uses Push Upgrade technology to upgrade to the latest version of the package.

X-Author for Contracts supports the versioning of agreements. The contract administrators can save multiple versions of the same document. For example, he/she can save redlined, clean, and final versions of a contract in a Microsoft Word document opened either from Salesforce or from the local drive. When saving a final version of a contract document, you can also reconcile any terms that might have changed during the negotiation process. You can create and maintain template versions, insert templates, save them, and replace them to and from Conga. Finally, you can compare two versions of a contract and merge versions into one document.

X-Author for Contracts also provides support for creating conditional text within a contract or clause template. This allows contract administrators to create sophisticated conditional clauses that can include or exclude certain text or clauses depending on how a conditional expression is evaluated.

Prior to Winter '20 release, X-Author for Contracts was supported for Conga CLM. Using X-Author for Contracts, Conga CLM users can manage the entire contract and template process. From Winter '20 release, X-Author for Contracts has introduced support for Conga CLM (Contracts for Salesforce) also. Now Conga CLM (Contracts for Salesforce) users also can manage the entire contract template process.

This guide describes the following features for Conga CLM and Conga CLM (Contracts for Salesforce).

	Features for Conga CLM	Features for Conga CLM (Contracts for Salesforce)
Templates	Create a template	Create a template
	Search and open a template	Search and open a template
	Check in a template	Check in a template
	Clauses Use Clause Library for templates Insert inline clauses Make clauses smart or read-only Make clauses conditional Mark clauses Refresh clause	Clauses Use Clause Library for templates Insert clause and clause bundles Make clause and clause bundle smart Make clause and clause bundle conditional
	Fields Insert fields Insert fields as a table or section Make fields smart or read-only Make columns and rows conditional in a table	Fields Insert fields Insert fields as a table or section Make fields smart or read-only Make columns and rows conditional in a table
	Set segments (conditional or style)	Set segments (conditional or style)
	Define template locale	Define template locale
	Clone a template	NA
	Template Versioning	NA
Contracts	Search and open a contract	NA
	Check-in a contract	NA
	Check-out an agreement	NA
	Lock or unlock contract documents	NA
	Clauses Use Clause Library to insert clauses Mark clauses Unmark clauses Edit or delete clauses Hide or show smart boundaries Unlock read-only clauses Promote marked clauses to the playbook Track clauses in contracts	NA
	Fields Validate fields Mark fields Update smart and read-only field values from Salesforce Accept or reject field changes Delete fields or mark fields for deletion	NA
	Compare and merge contracts	NA
	Send a contract for parallel review	NA
	Work with offline contracts Create offline contracts Import offline contracts	NA
	Use Intelligent Discovery	NA
	Use localization	NA
	Restrict contract document check-in and check-out	NA
	Reconciliation Preview reconcile Reconcile smart fields and smart clauses	NA

Rebranding

Previously, the product was called X-Author for Contracts 2.0. With Winter '20 release, it is called X-Author for Contracts.

Key Terminology

X-Author for Contracts uses the following terms.

Term	Definition
Contract	A contract is an arrangement with specific terms, enacted between two or more entities, in which there is a promise to perform something in return for valuable consideration or benefit.
Clause	Modular blocks of text that are used repeatedly. By adding these blocks to a library called a playbook, they can be reused continuously in multiple documents.
Document Lock/ Unlock	Locking a document prevents others from editing the document and checking in a new version at the same time you are working on it. Lock or Unlock (toggle) button is available on the X-Author for Contracts or X-Author Templates ribbon.
Document	The dynamically generated output from the merging of an agreement record’s data in the CRM with the static text of a template.
Merge Field	Static fields in a template which, at the time of agreement generation, take their value from the corresponding field in the Agreement record.
Offline Agreement Document	A document created directly in X-Author by taking an existing Word document that was created outside of Conga CLM and had not previously been associated with an agreement.
Playbook	A repository of templates, clauses, sections, or supporting documents, which can be inserted in the template as inline text or smart content-controlled text.
Reconciliation	Reconciliation is a process that enables changes made to smart fields in an agreement document, outside of the CRM/ X-Author environment, to be reconciled with the data held in the Agreement record in the Conga CLM. Values of smart fields and clauses can be reconciled when you check-in the agreement document in X-Author for Contracts.
Smart Field	Editable fields with the content control property. You can change the value of a smart field in a generated agreement document. These values can be reconciled with the corresponding fields on the agreement record in the CRM.
Template	Blueprints to generate a variety of document types when merged with data from quotes or proposals.
Read-only Field	Read-only fields have content control borders (similar to smart fields) but are non-editable in a generated agreement document. You can update the value of an Update field in an agreement document only by using Update from Conga CLM. Functionally, these fields lie between smart fields and merge fields. Read-only fields are not inline like merge fields and their values cannot be edited like smart fields.
X-Author for Contracts	A Microsoft Word add-in that enables the legal team of an organization to execute an entire contract lifecycle inside Microsoft Word.

For more information about terms used with Conga products, see Conga Product Glossary.

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About X-Author for Contracts

Rebranding

Key Terminology