Product Area: Summary Page

 Impact of Change: User experience improvement

 Roles Impacted: All user

Details

The information present in the 'Manage' tab in summary page used to be hard to find for our users, primarily because manage tab was not easy to identify & users did not know that the information is present in Manage tab. This lead to friction in the task users might be trying to complete.

To address this issue we have reorganised the contents of the summary page to make information accessible. Notable changes are:

• Moving Activity log card to the left bottom of the summary page
• Bring out info cards (approvals, contract info, related document, etc.) from the 'Manage' tab & getting rid of 'Manage' tab

How to Enable: It will be enabled by default for all users in the general release this week

Relevant Resources:  

 Product Area: Contract Editing/Review

 Impact of Change: New Integration

 Roles Impacted: Legal Users/Editors

Details

Users can now access the DraftMate plugin within the SpotDraft editor to collaborate on documents using Microsoft Word.

Things to note:

1. If users have DraftMate installed, they will be automatically re- directed to comment pane for the contract when they open DraftMate if they are editing via WebDAV
2. The feature accessibility on DraftMate is maintained. It supports tagging, internal and external comments, and access to clause library.
3. DraftMate also shows the time at which the last version was saved to SpotDraft i.e., when they hit command/ctrl + s

How to Enable: This feature is enabled in beta, by default, on all the workspaces using Word for Desktop.

Relevant Resources: Help Center Documentation 

 Product Area: Notifications

 Impact of Change: Improved UX

 Roles Impacted:Business Users & Legal Users

Details

We’ve significantly enhanced SpotDraft notifications on Slack, making them clearer and easier to consume!

Contract information is now presented in a more detailed and granular format, helping users quickly understand the contract and take action faster.

Note: This improved format is currently available for Signature and Approval request notifications only.

How to Enable:Released to all workspaces.

Relevant Resources: Help Center Documentation 

 Product Area: Upload contracts

 Impact of Change: Quality of life

 Roles Impacted:All users who upload contracts

Details

When users would hit “Save and review” while uploading multiple TPPs, they wouldn’t know why they’re unable to proceed. They would just be stuck on the screen without any feedback. It was because there was atleast one field in a contract that wasn’t filled--but we wouldn’t tell the user which one.

Starting today, as soon as users click on the “Save and Review” button, we’ll take them to the contract which is throwing a “required” error.

This is applicable for Intake forms on “Upload for Review” and “Send for Signature” workflows, and for the default three questions for “Upload Executed Contracts” workflows.

How to Enable:This feature is now live for all workspaces.

Relevant Resources: NA 

 Product Area: Salesforce integration

 Impact of Change: Enhanced Salesforce Integration for Third-Party Contracts

 Roles Impacted: Anyone using the Salesforce integration, primarily for Third-Party use case with intake forms.

Details

We’re excited to announce a key improvement to our Salesforce integration!

Previously, our system could only auto-populate information for template-based workflows, leaving users to manually fill in details when working with third-party contracts. With this update, intake forms for third-party contracts can now be auto-populated directly from Salesforce, just like our template contracts. The setup process mirrors the template setup, ensuring no additional learning or context is required.

How to Enable:This will be available out of the box to anyone using the revamped Salesforce integration (Note: This is not supported on the legacy integration).

Relevant Resources: Help Center Documentation 

 Product Area: Workflow Manager

 Impact of Change: New Functionality

 Roles Impacted:Business Users & Admin Users

Details

You can now set a default currency for your workflow!

This currency will auto-fill for all currency-related questions when business users create a contract. The default can be either fixed for all contracts or set conditionally based on responses to a dropdown question.

Additionally, you can lock the currency, preventing business users from changing it during the contract creation process.

Example: James, the legal ops manager and SpotDraft Admin for Acme Inc., is setting up an Order Form workflow. He wants the currency to change based on Acme’s regional entity creating the contract. He maps INR to the India entity, USD to the US entity, and Euro to the European entity. To ensure compliance, he locks the currency, preventing business users from selecting currencies not approved by the finance team.

How to Enable: Released to all workspaces by default. 

Relevant Resources: NA 

 Product Area: Activity Logs

 Impact of Change: Usability Improvement

 Roles Impacted:All users

Details

SpotDraft's Activity Log can be quite long, especially for contracts that have a lot of activity. This makes it difficult for the users to quickly find an information when they come looking for it.

To solve for this, the activity log now offers a default state with four distinct filters. They are as follows:

• All: This is the default state and shows all the logs associated with the contract.
• Comments: View logs related to comments that have been added by users to collaborate on the logs.
• Emails: View logs related to emails sent and received using Send flow for a contract through SpotDraft.
• Approvals: View logs related to approvals or rejections of changes made to the contract.
• Versions: View logs showing when new contract versions have been published via uploads or editor.

These filters can be used individually or in combination. For example, you can select "Comments" and "Versions" to see only those entries. You cannot, however, apply "All" with any other filter.

How to Enable: No action required. The Activity Log filters are now enabled by default for all users.

Relevant Resources: Help Center Documentation 

 Product Area: Contract Metadata

 Impact of Change: Usability improvements

 Roles Impacted: All contract metadata users

Details

As promised, we’re back with more usability improvements on the metadata sidepanel!

Following from the problems in the original message above, we’ve gone ahead and improved the metadata sidepanel even further, this time working on three key things:

1. Improving the input fields: We’ve finally done away with our older input fields and we’ve made it much easier to consume the information. Paragraph fields were hard to read, and now they’re not. Similar case with multi dropdown values.
2. AI reasons for empty extraction: There are times when the AI extracts an empty value. In such times, it’s valuable to know the reasoning behind the empty extraction. We will now show the reason behind a failure, in the hope that it adds context to an empty extraction, and also helps users modify descriptions if needed.
3. Micro-animations and better iconography: Try this one out for yourself! The interface looks much more slick!

How to Enable: This is now live for all workspaces.

Relevant Resources: No resources at this time 

 Product Area: Approvals, Condition builder

 Impact of Change: Allow setting up of conditions for approvals based on entity

 Roles Impacted: Admins

Details

Entity-specific approvals earlier required to be set separately for each and every entity, this lead to duplicated effort at times requiring users to update the approvals. In the new approvals system we had replaced the entities-specific approval functionality by supporting entities as a variable on which conditions can be set, similar to all the other variables supported in condition builder.

How to Enable:This feature is supported out-of-box on the new approvals system (AKA Approvals V5)

 Product Area: Approvals, Condition builder

 Impact of Change: Allow setting up of more complex conditions for approvals & reduce the no. of conditional approvals by combining conditions

 Roles Impacted: Admins

Details

~70% of approvals setup on workflows are conditional approvals but our current condition builder supports only simple combinations of conditions like -

• Condition A AND Condition B
• Condition A OR Condition B

Complicated combinations of condition like below were not supported

• [ Condition A AND Condition B ] OR [ Condition C AND Condition D ]

With the Advanced mode for condition builder users can write directly write formulas similar to Excel/Google Sheets as conditions, thus allowing the support for much more complicated & nested conditions.

This update will also help reduce the no. of approvals that are set at workflow level because conditions can be nested wherever relevant.

How to Enable: This feature is only available on the new approvals system. We can enable it for workspaces on demand.

Relevant Resources:

•  Supported Functions in Advanced Condition Builder 
•  Using Advanced Mode in Conditions Builder