Great post...110% agree...dealing with support partners is a real challenge with the current implementation of the Self Service Portal.

Having initial case management via the partner portal would be great, and I'd like to add the following to the thread:

It needs to be flexible and secure so that a number of use case scenarios can be addressed. eg:


1. Partner (account A) can open a case for its customer (Account B) and can chose to make the case visible to its customer. Case should be visible to superuser contacts in both accounts.


2. Customer (account B) can open a case (if they have a support contract) and optionally chose to allow the case to be visible to one of its partners (account A).


3. Where multiple partners sell to the same end user (Account B), the partners should not be able to view cases related to the other, so some form of account hierarchy and privalidge needs to be in place.

Our channels also need to see any trouble tickets from the customers they brought to our company.

Enabling third party service or partner service management has not been well addressed over the years. We're planning to address this problem. I'd like to validate a list of our product management roadmap priorities.

Do you agree with our stank ranking of these three features?

1. Enable partners to submit cases for themselves and track cases for themselves.
2. Ability for partners to receive, work and close cases with a case inbox on their homepage
3. Ability for partners to be able to submit a case on behalf of one their customers.

As an aside, it's our assumption that Partner A should never (ever) see the data of Partner B unless there is an explict agreement by these two companies to share data.

This ranking does not address our business model...but its a community so I'm sure I'm not the only voice on this one ;-)

1. They can do this today via the Self Service Portal...Our partners have a sales arm and a service arm that access different parts of the application. Service arm will not use the leads aspect of the Portal...so are happy with the separation right now (portal vs CSSP)...although would like more capabilities.

2. Not relevant to us. Partners have their own CRMs and will not use our instance of SFDC to manage their cases. Many support orgs work in multivendor environments so it is not practical for them to log into each vendors CRM to log cases...they need their own. This description emulates the CoreBlox environment...which is not for us.

3. YES...YES..YES #1 for us, however its important that the right levels of security are in place. When partners have 100's of customers, a quick way to reference their customer accounts to their own is important. Its not simply separating the contact from the account on the case (Winter 07 feature), but more than that...A case needs to be linked to multiple accounts (Primary and secondary) so both can see the status of the case.

4. Being able to link our partners CRMs to SFDC via an API would be a nice to have but not a MUST have for us at this time.

Mutley, regarding number 3, do you expect your partners to have a lists of assigned accounts or they can see all your accounts in your database? What are the criteria or the rules that govern a partner's ability to view a customer account? Curious to know how this works in your business.

We have a custom picklist in the account that maps each account to a partner. Perhaps a better way to address this problem would be to use the "partners" related list within the account record.

We would like our partners to have access to view cases (open and closed) of joint customers in the partner relationship view.
We would also like to have them be able to see the Bugs and New feature custom object queues

You can expose Custom Objects in the portal with the Winter 07 release of PRM. Therefore, you should be able to expose your Features and Bugs custom objects right now.

We plan to expose Cases in the partner portal later this year.

I completely agree. Providing partners with the ability to view cases related to clients they manage would truly be a great feature. Maybe even allowing partners to enter new cases on behalf of clients would be an added bonus. This would bring the CRM, Support and PRM features inline.

It's very important to have a 'Cases' tab in the PRM portal as the partners need access to submit support cases or requests. Any ideas on how this can be done with some customization or using apex development?

Thanks in advance for all the inputs.

Milind Ghyar

Our Partners also assist with both the Sales and the Support of our Clients, therefore it would be beneficial for them to have access to Cases, Accounts and Contacts in the Partner Portal so they could have all the information they need to be successful available to them in one spot.

We are a maintenance outsourcing business where we operate a help line on behalf of clients and farm cases out to 3rd parties. At the moment we can't afford to give these 3rd parties access and we have to give our clients full enterprise licences when all they do is update account and cases status fields and add comments. It would be great to have our client and these 3rd party partners to see these cases and the account and contacts they relate to within the PRM portal