Integrations

What do integrations offer?

Throughout the app, ClauseBuddy offers possibilities to use external documents — e.g. to compare documents, summarise documents or extract clauses from contracts. Those documents can either be uploaded by the user (e.g., by dragging documents from the filesystem), or can be retrieved from an external system that gets integrated into ClauseBuddy.

ClauseBuddy currently supports three such integrations: document solution iManage, legal workflow solution LawVu and Office 365/OneDrive. In the future, we expect additional integrations to be added.

In the screenshot below, you can see all options presented, with the manual upload at the left, and the various integrations at the right.

Configuring the integrations

Conceptually, all three integrations are set up in the same way, so we handle them jointly, only noting the small differences.

First step: enabling integrations at the customer-level

Ask your ClauseBuddy customer support representative to enable your selected integration(s) at the customer level. This is not a step that customer administrators can do themselves, because there may be additional licensing costs involved.

When an integration is disabled at the customer-level (which is the default), no user will see the integration in modules such as those depicted in the screenshot above.

It is not currently possible to selectively enable/disable the integrations for some users or profiles. The integrations are either enabled at the customer-level (i.e., made available to all users), or disabled altogether.

However, as is explained below, each user must make their own integration connection, using their own external credentials.

Second step: configuring the integration as an administrator

When logged in as an administrator, go to Administration in the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner of ClauseBuddy. In the screen that appears, choose the tile Integrations.

In the screen that appears, click on to the Admin tabsheet. You will then see the already configured integrations at the customer-level. For example, in the screenshot below, the integration for LawVu is already configured.

Click on the green Add integration button to add a new integration.

Next, you may optionally want to change the default settings of the integration by clicking on the cog icon to the right of the integration (not relevant for Microsoft 365). These settings will apply to all subsequent "Integration connections" by individual users.

Third step: have each user log into the external system

The final step is to have each user create an "Integration connection" to the external system, using their own external credentials (via an industry-standard OAuth2 flow). This can be done adhoc, when the user actually wants to retrieve a document from the external system — this will be indicated by having the menu being greyed out and saying click to connect, as illustrated below.

When the user would click on one of the click to connect options, a popup window will appear with the login screen for the external system. They should then use their own external credentials to log in, and grant any necessary permissions to ClauseBase.

ClauseBase neither receives nor stores users' external login credentials. For more information, see https://oauth.net/2/.

Once the connection is established, users can disable the connection by going to the Integrations option in the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner.

They will then arrive at a table that shows all currently established connections.

Fourth step: retrieving documents

Assuming the connection with the external system is established, the user will see a dialog box that allows to select & download relevant documents. This dialog box will slightly differ for each external system, as each external system offers different search & organisation possibilities.

For example, the dialog box for LawVu would show:

While Office 365 shows: