This chapter covers the following topics:
The Partner Locator allows a potential customer to search for partners, resellers, and value-added resellers (VADs) that are registered with your organization through Oracle Partner Management. Partner Locator integrates with your organization's Web portal, so you can make it available to your partners' potential customers independent of the Partner Dashboard or Oracle Partner Management.
Partner Locator identifies partners that are located a certain distance from a customer's starting address. The search distance is determined by the vendor, and is set through two profile options:
PV: Locator Distance: Specifies the distance within which the Partner Locator will search for partners
PV: Locator Default Distance Unit: Specifies the unit of measure (for example, miles or kilometers) used for the distance specified in the PV: Locator Distance option
For each partner match identified, the Partner Locator returns the partner's street, web address, and phone number. The Partner Locator also provides a map showing the partner's location and driving directions from the customer's starting address to the partner's address.
The Partner Locator performs an address confirmation check on the starting address entered by the customer. If the Partner Locator is unable to find an exact match, the customer is asked to select an address from a list of potential addresses or locations.
The Partner Locator also provides an advanced search tool to further help potential customers find the right partner. Refer to “Enabling Partner Profile Attributes for Advanced Search” for additional information.
To make the Partner Locator available through a portal, a hyperlink needs to be added to the portal. The hyperlink should point to the machine where Oracle Partner Management is installed and the URL should look similar to the following:
http://<server_address><: server_port if any>/OA_HTML/pvxLoctrSearch.jsp
The Partner Locator provides potential customers with an advanced search tool that they can use to locate partners that meet certain criteria. The criteria that are available for the advanced search are mapped to partner profile attributes. An attribute is available for use in the Partner Locator advanced search if it is active and if it has been enabled for the Locator.
Both the Matching Services and Locator checkboxes must be selected for a partner profile attribute to be available for the partner locator.
For more information on partner profile attributes, refer to Chapter 7, Setting Up Partner Profile Attributes.
There are certain system profile options that must be set for the Partner Locator. For the profile options for Partner Locator, refer to Appendix A, System Profile Options.
Certain concurrent programs must be run to set up and maintain the Partner Locator. For a list of the concurrent programs for the Partner Locator, refer to Appendix C, Concurrent Programs.