When someone asks what software you use for writing and editing contracts and other documents, chances are the first words out of your mouth are Microsoft Word.
It’s not a surprise. Most of us frequently use it for creating, sharing, and redlining different kinds of documents.
MS Word and MS Word Online may seem like a good start if you want to gain control over your contracts. Many organizations use them, and we’re all accustomed to their features. Nevertheless, when it comes to contract lifecycle management, MS Word has its flaws, such as:
- No real-time updates
- Manual redlining and errors
- Approval delays or lags
We can say that its biggest drawback is the lack of side-by-side collaboration. Taking MS Word’s benefits and shortcomings into consideration, we created AXDRAFT’s Collaborative Editor.
Our Collaborative Editor is built to serve as a single source of truth for your negotiating and redlining processes. It enables you to stay in control of all the changes inside your contracts, and get documents approved 3x faster. Now let’s take a closer look.
What Is Collaborative Editor?
Many of us started using MS Word back when we were in school, and it’s been our go-to tool throughout university and our careers. No wonder we’re so attached that it’s difficult to leave it behind.
Most likely, your team members or counterparties may still want to use MS Word, which is why our Collaborative Editor is fully 100% compatible with Microsoft Word and MS Word Online, forwards and backwards. You can export any AXDRAFT document to MS Word, maintaining every element of formatting, style, and redlines.
Our Collaborative Editor is a tool that helps you collaborate on documents with other people simultaneously. Together, you can edit, comment, and work on different versions with several people in real time (and from multiple locations).
Below we’ll consider how it works and its uniqueness, but if you’re more of a visual person, here’s a video you can check out.
Collaborative Editor vs MS Word
MS Word is still the gold standard for document drafting and review, so flawlessly exporting and importing with it is a must. But to make the redlining and approval processes easier and faster, we need something more. Let’s take a peek at how Collaborative Editor features improve the process of document creation.
Tables and formatting: MS Word tables, pictures, and formatting are great and convenient tools for structuring information. That’s why it’s crucial to have them for your CLM. AXDRAFT’s Collaborative Editor supports most complex formatting: images, multi-level lists and tables, and indentation, all while preserving the original look of your document, whether it’s simple tables or multi-level 100-page lists. In this way, it outperforms Word by far.
Comments: Team members can leave necessary comments for those who will review next. Commented text will be highlighted and reviewers can easily navigate between comments. Our Collaborative Editor allows you to see all comments, both pending and resolved, so that you have more control over changes.
Review assignments: To make creating documents even more convenient, we added a function that allows you to assign specific team members to check certain clauses so that they don’t have to review and rewrite the entire agreement. This also eliminates the possibility of unwanted edits.
Real-time redlining: With our Collaborative Editor, multiple users can redline the document side-by-side in real time, without conflicts or freezes. Since all changes are recorded, this creates a digital paper trail that shows what was changed, when, and by whom. On top of that, the Editor provides version control so that you can easily roll back any unwanted changes that have been made.
Clause library: The best legal teams have playbooks, and they want to be able to use them to speed up the review of simple agreements. AXDRAFT provides a clause library that’s integrated with the Collaborative Editor, enabling the swapping of clauses from the document with new ones from the library in just a few clicks. This puts you in a position to review documents faster and improve compliance across the company.
Version Control: Once you receive a version, just upload it back to our platform, which will automatically compare it with the latest AXDRAFT version. Whether you’re working inside or outside of AXDRAFT’s Collaborative Editor, you’ll get all the benefits of no hidden redlines and full version control on all your contracts.
To sum up, we can say that we took the best of MS Word’s features, improved them, and added a few more to eliminate drawbacks. That makes our Collaborative Editor just like MS Word, but better.
Wrapping Up
AXDRAFT’s Collaborative Editor is a unique tool. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that while it’s a native AXDRAFT feature, you can also easily export and import any MS Word document without losing ANY of the quality, formatting, or redlines.
It’s built from scratch with docx as the underlying foundation, so it supports everything that MS Word can do. At the same time, it introduces simultaneous cross-team collaboration, a clause library, and full version control. It streamlines all operations on the platform and saves A LOT of time on editing and formatting since the latter doesn’t break during the import/export process (which is a very common case). Our Collaborative Editor will help you forget about disorganized and disjointed contract management workflows across different stages of the contract lifecycle.
If you still have any doubts, feel free to book a demo with us and compare your existing workflow to a workflow with AXDRAFT. We’ll be happy to answer all your questions.