Managing Content for Contract Documents

You can control content of contract documents at three levels: global clauses, document templates, and individual revisions.

Global Clauses: Content stored in global clauses can have the most broad impact. Global clauses can include subclauses which can be local or global. Global clauses are available to be included in any template. Any document generated from a template that includes a global clause automatically receives the most recently updated clause content.
Document Templates: Each contract type has its own custom document template. The template consists of a set of clauses. Each clause can be local or global. When the template is updated, any future contract documents that are generated from contracts of that type will include the updated content.
Contract Document Revisions: The first revision of a contract document is always generated from the contract template but documents can be edited in Microsoft Word and uploaded to Contract Management as new revisions. No content changes to templates or clauses will affect revisions that have already been saved. You must regenerate the document to pick up any changes that were made after the last time you generated the document.

Contract document lifecycles generally include multiple reviews, revisions, and updates. Contract Management supports a flexible lifecycle with multiple revisions.

Working with Document Revisions

The first revision of a contract document is generated directly from the document template that is associated with the contract type. The generated document is in Microsoft Word format so it can be distributed, reviewed and edited in Microsoft Word and then uploaded to Contract Management as a new revision of the contract document.

When a change is made to a clause in the template or to global clauses in the library that are used by the template, the changes DO NOT affect revisions that were generated before the changes were saved. These changes will be included in all documents generated after that point. If you want to incorporate changes made to the template into an existing contract document, you can regenerate the document and save it. The regenerated document will pull everything from the updated template but, any changes made in Word and uploaded won't be included in the newly generated revision. When viewing the revision history, different icons indicate which revisions were generated directly from the template and which were uploaded from external Word files.

You can select one revision to be "final" with the Mark as Final feature. Contract Management also allows you to quickly compare two revisions by providing direct access to the Document Compare feature in Microsoft Word.