Creating template documents in OpenText Content Server with ICCS

OpenText Content Server solution satisfied our client’s content management needs thanks to its ease of use, flexibility, and wide functionality. However, the client’s main concern was to ensure that typical documents always have the same structure, with some essential elements, and only designated sections of the document are editable by the staff.

More specifically, our customer already had their client information stored in Content Server, so they needed to develop functionality for creating legal contracts using this information. The requirements included:

• having a list of predefined contracts available from the standard Content Server interface;
• both flexibility and control when creating legal documents;
• a legal contract should have predefined static parts and provide the possibility to change customer-specific parts of the contract;
• the ability to create documents fast and represent their specific relationship with each specific contractor;
• keeping the list of templates short, so expanding the list of contract templates for each contractor wasn’t an option.

Our solution based on Interactive Correspondence for Content Server provided the following functionality:

• Exposing Exstream Templates (Themes) as Content Server Template Workspace templates;
• Creating Exstream generated documents just like any MS Word based template directly in Content Server;
• Getting business data from CS Category attribute values;
• Managing the whole life cycle as templates or business data changes: re-generating document with updates from Content Server or with updated template changes.

We have delivered a solution that allowed our customer to reduce the number of fixed templates and control the contracts more easily. Previously their employees had to create a different template for each contract. The number of templates had been growing so it was very difficult to search for them and control them.

The solution enabled the client to set up an established process of how contracts are modified by one user and how they are approved depending on a specific client. Therefore, the management can be confident that although the contracts are tailored for individual customers, they still meet predefined form and requirements.