Migrating existing contract notices into our platform

This article is a guide to the process of migrating existing contract notices into your new instance of our Contract Management Platform.

This guide contains the following:

• Introduction
• Importing your Companies, Users, Projects and Contract
  • Creating workflows on contracts
  • Creating the notices in the workflows
  • Uploading attachments (if necessary)
  • Importing associations between notices

Introduction

Migrating content from an external system such as CEMAR, Sypor, Aconex, Conject or Asite into our contract management is a multi-step process where data from one step is required for subsequent steps.

Planning is critical. You'll need to map the structure of your legacy content to FastDraft's 3-layer data structure:

1. System (Companies, Users, Projects and Contracts)
2. Workflows
3. Notices

Importing your Companies, Users, Projects and Contract

First, import the Users of all your company notices as Built Intelligence users. Notice authors in our Contract Management Platform must be Built Intelligence users with a Part Role. See Understanding our user roles.

To create Built Intelligence users with the API, see our API docs. Make sure to set both the system role  and party in each POST request.

An alternative to using our API is to use our import function, please contact our Customer Success Team for details and they can provide you with the CSV templates.

Record the id of each user. You'll need the ids to set the user id attribute of each notice you create in our platform.

Tip: You might want to create a map of each author id and their legacy contracts and notices.

If you plan on loading multiple companies in your import you will need to segment your user by companies, the companies have be to created before you create users. You can then assign the company id to the user when creating the user. See Create Companies in the dev docs.

Creating workflows on contracts

Speak to our Customer Success Team or see API docs to check what Workflow Group and Workflows are already prebuilt. Workflows Groups are collections of Workflows e.g. Compensation Events.

After finding the right workflows or creating a new workflow, you will need to populate the workflows with the notice details. These resources or details again can be populated via our API or using our bulk import tool. 

Record the id of each workflow group. When you create the workflows later, you'll need the ids to assign notices to specific workflows.

Creating the notices in the workflows

When you have all the workflow ids and user ids from the previous steps, you can create the notices. See Create Notices in the API docs. In addition to title and body, make sure to set author_id and workflow_id in each POST request.

Note that all contract users are automatically notified of new notices. If the contract has been activated, they'll get an email notification when the notices are created. An alternative to using our API is to use our import function, please contact our Customer Success Team for details and they can provide you with the CSV templates.

Uploading attachments (if necessary)

If a notice has attachments that aren't hosted on a public file server such as Amazon S3, upload the attachments to our Contract Management Platform. See creating Attachment in the developer docs. 

Importing associations between notices

To import links between different notices, you'll need both notice ids and the contract and workflow id. Both admins and end users can link notices. See Create Associations in the developer docs.