ECSpand Contract Management

As I attended a training concerning ECSpand contract management recently, I would like to summarize the key functionality of this interesting solution. First of all, the contract management is based on the ECSpand services. The ECSpand services add additional functionality to SharePoint like rendition, archiving or hierarchical records management to turn it into a fully functional ECM solution. You can find more information about the ECSpand services here.

But let’s return to contract management. As you might have already guessed, it’s all about contracts … Companies usually have to deal with a lot of different contracts – contracts with their employees, contracts with customers or suppliers. Of course, you can upload all of your contracts to SharePoint, and then? Wouldn’t it be nice to be informed about deadlines, search after special types of contracts and so on? That’s when the ECspand contract management comes into play.

By making use of the base ECSpand functionality you can define a hierarchy of contract types and define the according meta data for them. Combined with the ECSpand search web parts that generate the according search fields dynamically you can easily find your contracts. You can even display a preview of the document content which is also a part of the ECSpand services.

But my favourite part of the contract management solution is the improved interface for creating/editing contracts. The usability of the SharePoint default display of list properties decreases according to the increase of the number of metadata properties. That’s why the contract management solution replaces the default display and edit forms by providing an interface that enables you to manage all data concerning a contract in one place – not only simple metadata, but also documents, tasks, permissions and so on. By using tabs and collapsing you don’t lose the overview of your contract. Additionally they added own implementations of some less user-friendly controls like the date/time picker and the lookup which offers search-as-you-type functionality. For debugging purposes you can still switch back to the default view, which is also a big advantage in my opinion.

The last thing I want to mention is the administrative interface which enables you for example to create rules for e-mail-reminders in case of tasks or contract deadlines.

If you got interested in the product you will find additional information on our homepage or the portal systems website.

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Dec200921

Melanie Salomon

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