Integrated contract management

This paper focuses on business-to-business contractual relationship in the context of second-generation contract management solutions. In particular, it describes the contract framework developed at HPLabs Bristol, UK. The presented solution is based on the concept of electronic contract, which represents a machine interpretable model for contracts. The contract framework has been designed with the view to support the whole lifecycle of the contract. It consists of a set of components to be deployed in each enterprise to allow peer-to-peer message based interaction with contract participants. The deployment model ca n be easily changed to a portal deployment where the contract participants use a browser client to initiate the interactions on the portal.