Streamlining contract management with SharePoint Premium’s Content Assembly
When dealing with contracts, you want your users to be efficient and accurate. SharePoint Premium’s (previously known as Microsoft Syntex) Content Assembly feature offers a modern approach to creating and managing contracts. Let’s explore how this feature can ease your contract management process through two practical scenarios.
Scenario 1: Creating a standard contract with basic fields
In many cases, organisations have very standardised contracts with only a few details that vary from contract to contract, such as the name of the contract parties, dates and other numeric values. Usually, those details are also added as metadata on the document. For example, a service agreement or a sales contract could be one of these types of contracts. With SharePoint Premium’s Content assembly feature, adding those details to contracts and storing them as metadata is a straightforward process:
Create a Modern Template: Begin by uploading a Word document to create a modern template. This template will serve as the basis for your contracts.
Add fields: Select sections of the contract text to create fields. For instance, a field for the contractor’s name can be reused throughout the document. You can also map fields to data sources, like managed metadata.
Save the template and train your users to use it. Training is the most crucial step since your fancy new feature won’t benefit anyone without it.
Start the process by creating a modern template, set up the template by adding the necessary fields & publish the template.
After the template has been published, it’s available on the + New menu on the library ribbon. When a user starts to create a new contract, they only need to fill out the fields, and the model takes care of the rest.
Pro tip: Add a Power Automate automation to convert the filled contract to PDF, and you have a contract ready for signature. Oh, and by September 2024, we should have the SharePoint eSignature feature also available in the EU, so after that, your document never needs to leave SharePoint 😊
Scenario 2: Dynamic chapters on a modern template
Taking it a step further, SharePoint Premium allows you to add chapters to your contracts based on the details you’ve inserted. In addition to fields, you can implement conditional sections that appear or disappear based on the input values. This allows for dynamic customisation of contracts based on specific criteria.
For example, if you have an employee contract that requires different chapters based on the role hired (e.g. Specialist, manager or leader), you can set up metadata fields for each role. Only the relevant chapters for the selected role will be included when generating the contract.
The role description varies depending on the chosen position in the template.
Currently, you can only add text chapters or bullet lists as a dynamic chapter, but you cannot include headings in the dynamic chapter.
Other things to notice
Bear in mind that all the fields you add to the template are mandatory by default, so if there is something unnecessary to fill in, do not create it as a field in the template. Otherwise, the user cannot complete the form when creating a new document based on the template.
The modern templates are available in the specific library where they are initially configured. If you create a copy of the library, the model is duplicated, but it doesn’t work (there’s a bug), so you need to click the metadata columns/chapter configuration in place once more. Then again, I strongly recommend that these types of contacts should be available only in a centralised library.
After saving the document with the details filled in, the users can still edit it, if necessary, but contracts should often remain unchanged.
And, of course, you want to automate the workflow of generating contracts based on the information in your CRM or ERP. This is easily done with Power Automate, as we demonstrated with my community colleague Kimmo Koski at the DynamicsMinds 2024 conference 😉
Conclusion
SharePoint Premium’s Content Assembly feature makes it easy for the end user to create basic contracts without having to spend time finding the right template. In addition, it reduces the risk of human error when filling out the template details.
Happy contracting!