Concern with bug fix in V9 SP14

Question

My team is concerned with the following fix in V9 SP14 of SAP Sourcing:
2945814/2013
Property contracts.Enable_publish_to_supplier_check.External_Phase has been
introduced to control the behavior of phase change of contract document using “Publish to
supplier” Checkbox .
When set to true, the contract document can be changed to external phase only when “Publish to supplier” Checkbox is checked on the Header tab of MA.
When Set to false, the contract document can be changed to external phase irrespective of the status of the publish to supplier check box (checked or not checked) on the Header tab of MA
The issue being, if you do not check the "Publish to Supplier" checkbox and move to an external phase, the supplier receives email notification but does not have access to the contract in the system.  We were hoping to get a better understanding of the purpose of this "fix" as it seems to us that it would just cause confusion to the supplier.  I'm hoping someone can provide some additional information on the purpose of putting this fix in place.

Answer 1

Hello
Contract Documents that are moving from an Internal Only phase to an Externally visible one can only be seen by their suppliers if the Publish to Supplier checkbox is checked (and the publish date is in the past) on the relative Agreement document.  Some of our customers want to be warned when they have not checked the Publish to Supplier checkbox on the agreement and others do not want to be warned.  We added a new system property to provide our customers with the ability to choose how they want CLM to behave.
If the new system property contracts.Enable_publish_to_supplier_check.External_Phase is set to FALSE (default value) CLM will behave as it did prior to SP14.   This means that you can change a contract document to a phase that is visible to the suppliers without checking the Publish to Supplier Checkbox on the header tab of the related Agreement.
However even though the Contract Document is in an external phase (example: Supplier Draft or Executed), the suppliers still cannot access it from the Supplier portal unless the Publish to Supplier Checkbox is checked.  Alerts to the Supplier of the newly visible contract document were triggered by the contract document phase change. Suppliers were receiving the Alert even though the Agreement owner forgot to check the Publish to Supplier checkbox on the Agreement.  This is the main problem we were trying to address.
If the new system property contracts.Enable_publish_to_supplier_check.External_Phase is set to TRUE then you are prevented from changing the phase of a contract document from an Internal Only to Externally visible to suppliers unless the Publish to Supplier Checkbox is checked on the Agreement.   This ensures that any externally visible contract documents can be accessed by the suppliers by ensuring that the Agreement owner has remembered to check the Publish to Supplier checkbox on the relative agreement.
Many of our customers do not wish their suppliers to use the Supplier Portal to see Agreements right now but plan to use that feature in the future.  Even though they have configured some of their contract document phases as external they don't want Suppliers to see externally visible contract documents until they are ready to check the Publish to Supplier Checkbox.   In the meantime they don't want to be prevented from changing the phase of a contract documents to Executed (for example).  These customer should leave the new property set to FALSE.
For those customers that want their suppliers to see the contract documents that are in an Externally visible phase and need to be reminded to check the Publish to Supplier checkbox first should set the new system property to TRUE.   
I hope this helps.
Anne McClelland