Contract Express
customer support

Thomson Reuters provide a range of options for how the Contract Express solution can be deployed, the below provides an overview of the three main types of deployment that can be used to support the system. Different options require different types of licenses, please talk to your account manager for more information on the different license types available.

Deployment overview

On-Premise – This refers to where you take control of the hosting. This may be on your own internal servers, or through a hosting provider of your choice. This option gives you the most control and configurability over the environments, however will require internal maintenance. 

• Main Pro – Complete control over the installation and set up
• Main Con – Requires you to maintain your own infrastructure and environment

Multi-Tenant – This option is where you use our multi-tenant cloud. You will have your own discrete area that completely segregates your users and data, however the infrastructure and instance is shared with other clients. This is the simplest way to get up and running and always keep up with the latest version of Contract Express.

• Main Pro – The quickest way to get set up on Contract Express with low cost
• Main Con – Limited in flexibility – standard web address, upgrade schedule and authentication

Private Hosting – This option provides you with a standalone hosted instance of Contract Express that only contains your users and data. Environments are configured with three environments, a main production environment, a development environment (for testing upgrades, customisations and templates), and an actively replicated disaster recovery environment to minimise data loss and downtime in disaster events.

• Main Pro – The most flexible option allowing for different customisations and managing your own upgrade schedule
• Main Con – An additional hosting cost is applied for the service

Hosting Provider – Thomson Reuters uses Microsoft Azure for hosting Contract Express instances. This is a highly resilient and available provider that supports the needs of the instance for performance and high availability. For more information on this, see the Contract Express Azure Security Summary.

The solution is available on premise, or on the cloud as a privately hosted or multi-tenant solution.

Contract Express is available as a standalone server application, or deployed as Contract Express for SharePoint, or Contract Express for SalesForce.

If Thomson Reuters is managing the hosting, our primary hosting provider is Azure. The client can use other hosting providers if not looking to take advantage of a TR managed subscription.

There is out of the box availability to draw data from SharePoint lists, SQL tables and OData sources.

Contract Express has a rich and well documented API based upon the modern REST standard. This allows for the client to develop integrations with a wide variety of enterprise software. We can share the API manual if the client/prospect is under NDA. Notably while we offer the API to clients, we do not provide out of the box connectors, these must be developed. We cannot quote on costs for this, it would be most likely developed by an independent contractor and vary on the size of the project.

Questionnaires can be run on any supported browser on any platform however to create content a Windows PC running Office 2007 or later is required.

The hardware and software pre-requisites are published specific to the version and deployment. Once the client is engaged and under a confidentiality agreement contact Services to be provided a copy of the relevant manual.- needs rewording.

The site buttons are in English, however the questionnaires and documents may be in any language supported by Word. The system uses 'Locales' to provide deeper support for certain languages. The locales supported are - English UK, English US, French, French Canadian, Dutch, Danish. If a locale is supported, then when a user enters a number in digits, or a date, then the system can translate and put into documents the full written form in that language.

Though Templates must start as .docx files, documents can be generated as .dox, .rtf, .docx or .pdf.

Yes, the interface offers sharing capabilities with individual users or groups to collaborate on documents.

Yes, if your licence and set up enables this, the system supports inviting people to complete a questionnaire via email.

Yes, the system supports multiple workflows being generated. These can be set to always trigger, or only when certain questionnaire criteria are met. If using forms based authentication, email notifications may be sent out to relevant parties. Several workflows can be set on a single questionnaire to run either at once or in sequence.

Currently the system integrates with DocuSign and you may use your DocuSign licence from the generated documents page (if your administrator has enabled this). We are working on introducing compatibility for other e-signature solutions in the future.

Yes, reports may be generated to show over the space of a month how many documents have been generated and by who. Would the documents produced on the system be accessible via our knowledge management system, or would they only sit within the system? By default they sit within the system only. It would be possible to develop an integration using our API.

The tool allows for a basic text search to help quickly find templates to use, and also gives filtering options for them to check through generated contracts. Search of content is not possible.