Every year, Microsoft brings together thousands of developers for its Build conference, where people who are working on tomorrow’s technologies can share insights with attendees.
At this year's conference, held in Seattle, Icertis was privileged to be selected to showcase several aspects of the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform, which is built natively on Azure and offers deep integrations with a number of Microsoft Office 365 tools.
On Monday, Icertis' Chief Product Officer Nagi Prabhu and I showcased ICM's innovative approach with Microsoft Teams, demonstrating how the power of ICM is surfaced in Microsoft Azure platform tools like BOT framework, Office 365 and App Services to improve the contract management experience. We demoed both the workflow of the integration and, for the benefit of the developers in the room, the code under the hood that makes it work.
The Icertis Experience for Teams was conceived as a way to improve the way contract stakeholders—in particular legal teams—collaborate on contracts across enterprises. Traditionally, lawyers worked in two universes: Half their time was spent in Microsoft Word, where they authored and edited contracts, and the other half in email, where they communicated with other stakeholders. This slowed the contract review process, as a large amount of time was spent waiting for email responses from others.
Switching between email and Microsoft Word as they wait for responses also hurts productivity. The American Psychological Association has found that productivity drops 40 percent when workers have to change applications, or "contexts," to complete a task.
When we saw Microsoft Teams quickly gaining traction as an enterprise collaboration tool, we recognized the utility it could have for enterprise contract management for completely rethinking how the collaboration between stakeholders is done.
With Icertis Experience for Microsoft Users, a lawyer can review contracts that are hosted on ICM and start conversations about the contract on Teams without leaving Microsoft Word. In the demonstration, we offered this scenario: Say a salesperson changes the payment terms in a contract. ICM detects the change and routes it to legal for review. A person on the legal team is notified and opens the contract in Word, with an Icertis Experience for Microsoft Word highlighting the change. If the lawyer needs to ask other team members about the change, she can simply click a button to start a conversation in Teams. This real-time conversation where people can be included dynamically results in decisions in a matter of minutes, without leaving the context of the contract in question. Once the contract is approved, the entire Teams discussion is attached to contract in ICM for auditability.
At Icertis, we have long been focused on making our platform easy to use for users of the Microsoft ecosystem. The Icertis Experience for Microsoft goes beyond simple data integration enabling Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Teams users to create, view, approve and collaborate on contracts within the applications they use every day enabling better, faster business decisions.
To watch the demo, and to see the code used to drive it, watch the entire presentation here.
To learn more about Icertis Experience for Teams, download our datasheet now.