External Users and Document Collaboration

External users are the external supplier collaborators, signers, and deliverable owners who are outside of the customer's system that uses PeopleSoft Supplier Contract Management. These users must be defined and setup by internal or external supplier administrators so that they can manage, view, and edit contract documents.

External collaboration is the process of sending contract documents to an external user for review and updates and who then uploads the document where administrators or contract specialists can manually incorporate the reviews into a new version of the document. External users can review and comment about documents, or they can edit documents and amendments if permission has been granted in the PeopleSoft Supplier Contract Management system.

Internal contract managers or administrators can route documents for external collaboration (editing and uploading) to only the single external user who is defined as the primary contact. These external users can then route the document offline to gather inputs from the supplier side. During external collaboration, the system stages the amendment files for review on the external side and keeps the files separate from the files that are currently under version control. The administrator reconciles the returned files to decide whether to accept the files into version control or to manually copy or paste changes. Attachments are also staged so that new attachments added by the external user will have to be accepted before they become part of the core attachments.

External collaboration requires that external users have a sign on to your system using the supplier-side URL. Enabling external access to the internal PeopleSoft Supplier Contract Management system requires the setup of external web servers that are outside of an organization's firewall. For more information about external web servers, see the following PeopleTools documentation:

See PeopleTools: System and Server Administration and PeopleTools: Portal Technology

External users must have a user ID created for them, or create their own user ID using the self-registration feature provided using PeopleSoft eSupplier Connection. Access to specific external documents and deliverables is secured at the row level so that external users can only view and update information if that user is enabled to do so for that particular document or deliverable. In addition the document status and certain configuration settings determine when a contract and what history external user can view through the external portal.

SeeMaintaining Supplier Contact Information , Understanding PeopleSoft Supplier Contract Management Setup, and Understanding Document Life Cycles.

You can list external users using the Document Management page for each document you want to share with an external user. While you can define multiple external users for a document, each document has a primary external owner. This is the only external user who can upload modified or signed documents and comments as part of the collaboration or signing process. Other nonprimary external users can view the document but cannot make modifications. So, if multiple users at an external organization need to provide feedback and changes to a document, the primary external owner can circulate the document offline for those changes or signatures and upload the document back to the system upon completion.

For documents created against procurement contracts or purchase orders, you can define an external user as a contract collaborator using supplier contact setup. This retrieves the supply-side user ID as a default value into the document external contact including the supply side user id needed for row level document security.