Partner Portal Reference Implementation
The Partner Portal Reference Implementation (referred to as the Partner Portal application in this guidance) demonstrates how to use SharePoint to create an extranet facing, enterprise-scale, content-driven application. The following are some of the activities that external partners can perform using the Partner Portal application:
- View information from Contoso such as news and promotions.
- Navigate the product categories and view products by category.
- View product information.
- View product details and related information such as specification sheets and pricing. The pricing includes discounts that reflect contractual agreements. (This is only partially implemented.)
- See special offers and their details.
- Collaborate with Contoso on high-priority incidents.
- See a summary of the incidents that are currently open and the incidents that are closed.
- Collaborate with Contoso to resolve order exceptions.
- See an order exception's current status, manage outstanding tasks, and exchange information with Contoso.
The following are some of the ways that Contoso employees can use the Partner Portal application:
- Account managers can use the partner collaboration portal home page to edit content that is intended for specific partners.
- Account managers can view outstanding tasks for all their partners to determine what needs to be done to resolve problems.
- Account managers can navigate to a partner's portal from a central location.
- Employees can use images and video to create promotions that are intended for a specific set of partners. Pricing can be different for different partners.
- Sales managers can review and approve promotions before they are released. (This is not implemented.)
- Customer service representatives can use the standard incident management system client to create a collaboration space. (In the Partner Portal application, this is implemented as a stand-in .aspx page.)
- Customer service representatives and service engineers can collaborate with a partner to exchange information and coordinate tasks in order to resolve open incidents.
- Customer service representatives can close incidents in the incident management system. The partner can see historical information about the incident.