The things people ask before they buy

No. Termsroom is software delivered over the web. There is nothing to install, nothing to update, and no version drift between the two sides of a negotiation. You open a browser and sign in.

It is built to be used on a phone, a tablet and a computer, which matters because a lead negotiator checking what was tabled overnight is rarely at a desk. The same screens work on all three rather than a reduced version on the small one.

No. One side starts a negotiation and invites the other. The invited organisation sets itself up, connects its own storage and takes part. Pricing sits with the party that starts it unless the two agree otherwise.

It does not negotiate for you, does not recommend positions, and does not replace counsel. It is a record and a working surface, not an adviser.

In storage your own organisation owns. Termsroom validates the location, refuses personal accounts and personal OneDrive, and records the refusal. It then holds addressing and hashes: where the document is, and a SHA-256 per version. No document bytes and no clause text are stored by us.

There are two ways to connect a location and they do not carry the same custody position, so it is worth two sentences rather than one:

• SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. Termsroom holds addressing only: tenant, site, drive and folder. No credential is stored, because access is a token your tenant issues at the moment it is needed.
• S3 compatible bucket, your keys. Termsroom holds a credential for this one. The secret access key is encrypted into the vault the moment it arrives and is never shown again, not even to the person who pasted it; the endpoint, region, bucket, prefix and access key id are held in the clear as addressing.

The two set side by side, with what a security reviewer should check on each, are on the storage options page.

It depends which storage path you choose, and we would rather answer that precisely than reassuringly. On the SharePoint path, no: access is a token your own tenant issues at the moment it is needed, and your administrator can revoke it without contacting us.

On the bring your own storage path, yes. You create an access key in your own console and give it to us, and we hold the secret half of it, encrypted, for as long as the connection is active. It is never shown again, not even to the person who pasted it, and it is readable only by the service that moves bytes. Rotate the key in your own console and our access ends without our involvement.

One other credential exists: the Teams webhook address, if you link a channel. Same treatment, encrypted on arrival and never shown again.

No, and that is enforced in the database rather than in the interface. A caucus is visible only to its own members, its roster is readable only by people in it, and the other side cannot see that a particular person is on it. There is a query you can run yourself that returns every violation of that rule, and it should return nothing.

We hold no documents to read. We do hold the record: names, roles, timestamps, hashes, and discussion text typed into Termsroom. Access to production data is limited and logged, and the honest position on staff access is set out on the trust page rather than reduced to a slogan here.

That is the exception and we say so everywhere it appears. A discussion thread is a free text box, and a free text box is somewhere a clause can be pasted. Messages are held by Termsroom as platform text, and the product tells you this on the screen where you type. Documents are never held. This answer used to say messages are purged when a negotiation closes. They are not, yet: the function that purges them exists and nothing calls it. Ask us and we will purge a thread; automatic purging on closure is scheduled for 31 January 2027. We would rather correct this than leave you relying on it.

Not today. The readiness work is under way and the current stage, scope and target window are published on the trust page rather than described vaguely in a sales conversation. If a report is a condition of purchase, say so early and we will put the commitment in the contract rather than in an email.

Yes, and that is the point. The audit record is append only and hash chained, so an altered or deleted entry can be detected without our help. The trust page runs the same checks a customer can run against their own data and shows the result, including a check that every storage connection matches the custody claim published for its provider.

The document itself is checkable the same way. Every version carries a fingerprint, and running one command against your own copy of the file tells you whether you hold the same file as the one recorded. It takes a second and it does not involve us. Be precise about what it proves, because there are two cases. On a version that has been indexed, Termsroom read the file from your storage and computed the fingerprint itself, and refuses to build a clause index unless that value matches the one entered. On a version that has not been indexed, the fingerprint is one the tabling party computed and asserted, so it establishes that two copies are identical rather than that the value came from those bytes. The screen tells you which of the two you are looking at.

By a fingerprint rather than by a copy. Termsroom records a short value calculated from each version at the moment it is tabled, in a log that cannot be edited afterwards, and both sides hold the document itself in storage they each control. Two files with the same fingerprint are the same file, so the question of whose copy is authoritative does not arise.

This is a stronger position than a supplier holding a copy and telling you it is the right one, and it means nothing that happens to Termsroom affects your ability to prove what you agreed. What it is, what it does not prove, and why it is accepted in Canada, the United States and Europe is on the document integrity page.

Yes, HECVAT 4, version 4.1.6, covering security, privacy, IT accessibility and AI. It is available to any institution on request and we do not ask for an NDA first.

Worth saying plainly what that is: a HECVAT is a questionnaire a vendor completes about itself. There is no auditor and no pass mark, and the body that maintains it calls the answers self attested. It tells you what we say about ourselves in a format your own reviewers already know how to read. It is not a certification and we do not present it as one.

Three separate things, and it is worth keeping them apart because they carry different risks.

SharePoint, for storage. An administrator signs in and points Termsroom at one document library. That sign in asks for read only access so it can confirm the library exists and report what it found, and it deliberately does not request offline_access, so Microsoft issues no refresh token and there is no long lived user credential for us to hold or lose. That statement is about the Microsoft path specifically. Storage you connect with your own API keys works differently and is covered on the storage options page.

SharePoint, for ongoing use. Reads and writes afterwards use Termsroom’s own application identity with the Sites.Selected permission. That permission grants nothing on its own. Your administrator grants it to exactly one site, and can delete that grant at any time without contacting us, at which point access stops. Termsroom cannot enumerate your tenant and cannot reach any other site.

Teams, for notifications. Each party creates a workflow in its own channel and pastes the address into Termsroom. A card will name the negotiation, the reference and what happened, and link back. It never contains the document. Linking is live; sending on an event has not shipped, so a linked channel stays quiet until it does. Neither side can see where the other is notified, and deleting the workflow in Teams revokes it.

Teams, as a tab. A room can be pinned in a channel. The tab shows each person only what they are entitled to see, so being a member of the channel is not permission to read a caucus.

Delegated, at connection time: User.Read and Sites.Read.All. Application, for ongoing use: Sites.Selected. Termsroom does not request Sites.ReadWrite.All or Sites.FullControl.All at any point. If you see either of those on a consent screen for our application, something is wrong and we want to hear about it.

Connect an S3 compatible bucket with keys you create. That path is built and working: it takes an endpoint, a region, a bucket and a prefix, it refuses an endpoint that is not https, and it refuses a bucket that is readable by the public or that does not keep versions. It works against Amazon S3 and against anything that speaks the same API.

The trade is a real one. Because you supply keys, Termsroom holds a credential into that bucket for as long as the connection is active, which it does not on the SharePoint path. Scope the key to the one prefix we write under, and rotate it whenever you want us out.

Google Drive is listed as coming soon and is not built. Nothing connects to it today. Box, Dropbox, Azure Blob and on-premises storage have no implementation either. Some organisations will not treat consumer grade file sync as enterprise storage whatever the account type says, and the API key path exists partly for them. Say what you use and we will tell you what it would take rather than promise it.

By mobile number. An invitation is single use, expires, and can only be redeemed by somebody who verifies the number it was sent to, so a forwarded link achieves nothing. Termsroom stores only a hash of the invitation code, which means reading our database end to end would not let anybody in.

Nothing is lost. Everything belongs to the organisation rather than to the person, their room membership is ended with a date rather than deleted, and the documents were always in your own storage.

Your documents are already yours and were never anywhere else. The record is hash chained per organisation, and you can export your own chain as a file and verify it on your own machine, using a verifier that needs nothing from us while it runs. There is no stage at which leaving Termsroom requires our cooperation to recover your documents or to establish that your record has not been altered.