Siebel Partner Relationship Management Administration Guide > Managing Service > Using Solutions and SmartScripts to Help Partners Solve Problems >

Making Solutions Available to Partners

Service solutions are answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). You can create solutions to be used by your customers, employees, or partners. You can associate a solution with related solutions and resolution documents, so users can navigate among these related documents. A service agent can associate a solution with a service request or a change request to make it available to the user who logged the request.

Solution records may be published internally, externally, or both:

• Solutions published internally are accessible to your employees.
• Solution published externally are accessible to customers.

You publish solutions internally to make them available to partners, because Siebel PRM treats partner employees as your employees.

Use access control to make solutions accessible to a specific partner or partner community. Use the Catalog Administration screen to add the solution to a catalog that is associated with the partner community you want to make it visible to.

Your partners access these solutions through the Solutions view of the Solutions screen in the Siebel Partner Portal. Partners can browse through the solutions or use a key-word search to find the solution they need. The Solutions view shows a flat list of solutions, which is useful for a keyword search.

Alternatively, solutions can be added to catalogs and be made available to users through the InfoCenter screen. Navigation of the InfoCenter is more straightforward.

For information on creating and administering service solutions, FAQs, and resolution documents, see the section on solutions and service requests in Applications Administration Guide.