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Sharing Master Data with Partners

Master data is assigned to groups of employees rather than to individual employees. It is most common to assign the following types of master data to your partners:

• Literature. Documents used to sell or understand your products, such as sales brochures and technical backgrounders.
• Solutions. Answers to common service requests.
• Training Courses. Courses administered through the Siebel Partner Manager Training Administration screen.
• Products. The goods or services that you sell.
• Price Lists. The prices to this partner for the goods or services that you sell.

In addition, auction items, competitors, decision issues, events, resolution items, and response templates can also be assigned to categories.

For most master data, visibility is controlled by using catalog visibility. This mechanism lets you categorize master data into catalogs. The value in the catalog's Type field must be Partner for the catalog to be visible in the Siebel Partner Portal.

You control visibility to these catalogs using access groups, which are groups of different parties in your Siebel environment. Partner communities are a type of access group that you use to group partners, so you can give groups of partners access to the same catalogs of master data. For example, you might have a catalog specifically for Partner Literature, and you might give all partner communities visibility to this catalog. You might have a catalog for a specific product line, such as a catalog of all literature, solutions, products, and training courses related to your line of server products; and you might put all resellers who sell your line of server products into one partner community, so you can give this group of partners visibility to this server Catalog.

You can also create public catalogs, which have no visibility restrictions, to provide master data visibility to unregistered users and individual partners.

To assign most types of master data to partners, you add the partner company to the appropriate access group. Make sure your channel operations manager has set up the appropriate access groups and categories of master data. Then, any partner company that you add to the access group will have access to all the master data in the categories visible to that access group.

The exception is price lists, which are usually assigned to smaller groups of partner companies than other types of master data. For example, you may assign master data to an access group called Resellers, but you may have a different price list for each reseller, or you may have a standard price list for most resellers but special price lists for five of your resellers. Assigning price lists to access groups would limit the utility of the access groups, because price lists often do not follow the same rules as other master data.

For more information about master data, categories, and user groups, see Security Guide for Siebel eBusiness Applications.

To assign master data to partners, you must go through the following process:

• Create categories and access groups
• Add partner companies to access groups
• Assign price lists to partner companies

In addition, when you produce new master data, such as new sales brochures, you must add them to the appropriate category to make them visible to your partners.