Contract Negotiations

The following Document Designer enhancements support the Contract Negotiation feature. While designed to support Contract Negotiation, users can include the following Document Designer enhancements on any Document Designer template when Contract Negotiation is enabled on their Oracle CPQ site.

• Track Changes: Allow users to leverage Microsoft Word’s track changes feature in .DOCX output files. The Track Changes feature is enabled in .DOCX output files by selecting the Track Changes checkbox in the Document Properties panel of Document Designer.



Figure 1: Track Changes Check Box

• eSignature Vendor: Integrate with DocuSign and place an eSignature tag attribute within a text or heading element in a section, table, header, or footer of a Document Designer template.

• For additional information, refer to Document Designer Editor and Document Designer Layouts.
  

By default, the Contract Negotiation feature is disabled. When the feature is enabled, a Contract check box is available when creating new Document Designer templates and in the Document Properties pane of existing templates.

Complete the following steps to enable Contract Negotiation:

1. Navigate to the Admin Home page.

2. Click General Site Options under General.

   The Options-General page opens.

3. Set the Enable Contract Generation in Document Designer option to Yes.

Complete the following steps to select a single language Document Designer template to use as a contract template.

1. Navigate to the Admin Home page.
2. Under Commerce and Documents, click Document Designer.

3. From the Document Designer Templates page, select a single-language Document Designer template to use as a contract template.

   Multi-language Document Designer templates are not supported as contract templates.

4. From the Document Properties pane, select the Contract check box.

   With the exception of the spacer element, the page element, and the column break element, the remaining Document Designer elements are identified in the .DOCX contract file as clauses.

The ability to generate a list of differences between two .DOCX files is supported by the DOCX Compare REST API. For example: When a sales representative sends a contract to a customer, the customer reviews the contract and can either approve the contract or make modifications to the contract. When the latter occurs and the customer sends the modified contract back to the sales representative, the DOCX Compare REST API compares the clause tags in the original contract and the modified contract. During this comparison, the DOCX Compare REST API identifies updated content within clause tags and deleted content within clause tags and returns a list of differences. If the contents of text element or a section is removed, the DOCX Compare REST API treats the associated clause as deleted.

The list of differences only includes changes to the highest level object.

Example: If a text element located inside of a table element is altered, but the table dimensions also change, the result of Compare only displays the table that was modified. The table contains the change to the text element.

Example: If a document is embedded in the middle of a section, then text elements are added to the embedded document, the section is broken into two parts with a page break in the middle of the section. A Compare on this section only displays that the section was modified. The section contains the embedded document and text elements.

Consider the following tips when using the Compare REST API:

• The two files compared must both use the .DOCX format and be generated from the same single language Document Designer template.

  Generating a list of differences between two .DOCX files created from different single–language Document Designer templates is not supported by the DOCX Compare REST API.
• The Compare REST API accepts two Commerce file attachment attribute IDs as input and returns a list of differences between the two document versions. The Compare REST API does not, however, identify differences between headers, footers, or heading styles.
• The DOCX Compare REST API supports the ability to generate a list of differences between document versions.

Example: When a sales representative sends a contract to a customer, the customer reviews the contract and can either approve the contract or make modifications to the contract. When the latter occurs and the customer sends the modified contract back to the sales representative, the DOCX Compare REST API compares the clause tags in the original contract and the modified contract. During this comparison, the DOCX Compare REST API identifies updated content within clause tags and deleted content within clause tags and returns a list of differences.

For additional information, refer to the DOCX Compare REST API topic.

The ability to merge approved changes into a .DOCX contract document is supported by the DOCX Merge REST API. For example: When a contract modified by a customer is uploaded into Oracle CPQ by a sales representative, the sales representative can merge and apply the approved changes. The DOCX Merge REST API supports this activity by merging the approved changes into the target document.

For additional information, refer to the DOCX Merge REST API topic.