Creating an NDA
Organizations collaborate with external contributors to build their services and products. A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is an important of these collaborations. It binds all the parties from releasing any confidential information that might damage either entity.
The most widely used NDA format is a PDF document. Organizations prepare an NDA and send it to all parties. Then, once everyone has signed, they initiate the contract. In a high-velocity team, manual PDF creation slows the progress.
What you can learn
This hands-on tutorial explains how to create a specialized Microsoft Word NDA template for your company. Adobe’s free add-in for Microsoft Word, Adobe Document Generation Tagger, inserts “tags” to input the dynamic values. Learn how to pass the JSON data to the template and create a dynamic PDF. The resulting PDF can be emailed or shown to your collaborators in their browser, depending on your business requirements and goals. To follow along, you just need a little experience with Node.js, JavaScript, Express.js, HTML, and CSS.
Relevant APIs and resources
With Adobe Acrobat Services, you can generate PDF documents on the fly using dynamic data. Acrobat Services offers a suite of PDF tools, including Adobe Document Generation API to automate NDA creation.
Creating the JSON model
The Microsoft Word template depends on the JSON model, so you create that first. For the tutorial, you use a basic JSON structure that contains company details, such as contact information.
{
"vendor": {
"companyName": "GlobalCorp",
"street": "123 Any Street",
"street2": "",
"city":"Anywhere",
"state":"CA",
"primaryContact": {
"firstName":"John",
"lastName":"Doe",
"email":"john-doe@example.com",
"phone":"123-456-7890"
}
},
"authorizedSigner": {
"firstName": "Sarah",
"lastName": "Rose",
"email": "sarah@example.com",
"phone":"555-555-1234"
}
}
You use this structure inside Microsoft Word to generate a template. This data can come from any data source, as long as it is in JSON format. For simplicity, you create multiple files inside the Node.js application, but your use case might require a database connection to pull vendor information.
Creating the Microsoft Word template
Create the NDA template in a Microsoft Word document. Adobe PDF Services API expects the Microsoft Word document to contain tags where the service can inject values from JSON documents. Although the template is the same for all requests to Adobe, the dynamic data in JSON changes. These tags help create PDF documents for every vendor in this case, using a single Microsoft Word template and speeding up the process by automating NDA document generation.
You can install the free Document Generation Tagger add-in to Microsoft Word. If you are a part of an organization, you can request your Microsoft Office administrator to install the free add-in for everyone.
Once you have the add-in installed, you can find it in the Home tab under the Adobe category. To open the tab, select Document Generation:
Inside the tab, you can upload the sample JSON document. This document can be a sample because you only use it to create a Microsoft Word template.
Select Generate Tags to view items you can use inside your template. Here are the properties extracted from the JSON structure, ready for use in the template:
These are the features from the authorizedSigner field. Other fields are wrapped, and you can expand the view in Microsoft Word. The add-in offers advanced data options as well, such as tables, lists, calculated values, and more.
