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Setting Up Access Groups and Categories for Siebel PRM

This task is a step in Process of Setting Up Siebel PRM.

Siebel business Applications include two different types of data:

• Transactional Data. This is data that users can create, read, edit, and delete. For example, opportunities, accounts, contacts, and service requests. This data can be assigned to individuals, to groups of individuals (such as a sales team), or to organizations.
• Master (or Referential) Data. This is data that users can only read, such as sales literature and service solutions. It is usually assigned to groups of users through access groups.

Channel managers use access groups and categories as follows to assign master data to partners:

• Access groups. These are groups of parties, such as organizations, divisions, user lists or positions. Individuals such as contacts or employees cannot be assigned directly to an access group. If you want to add an individual partner to an access group, you must add the partner to a user list and assign the user list to the access group.
• Categories. These are groups of data. For example, you might create a category with your product literature and frequently asked questions about a specific product line.

Before channel managers assign any master data to partner companies, the channel operations manager must analyze the way you need to share master data with your partners and create the appropriate categories and access groups.

For example, you have partners who sell different product lines that your company manufactures, such as servers and desktop computers. Some partners do not sell all of the products within a given product line; some might sell only the most powerful servers or the low-priced desktops. In this situation, you can create categories for the product lines you sell, and also create categories for each individual product that you sell, for each specific model of server and desktop computer. Then, you would associate sales literature, training courses, and other information about an entire product line with the appropriate category, and associate information about an individual product with the appropriate category.

Finally, you would create access groups for partners that sell each product line, such as Server Resellers and Desktop Resellers. Each of these access groups could have child access groups for each product within the product line. The access groups could then be associated with the appropriate catalogs and categories; for example, the server access group would be associated with the server catalog. The structure would be in place so that when partners are added to the access groups they get information about the product lines and the specific products they sell.

After the channel operations manager has done this initial work of setting up categories and access groups, the channel managers can assign data to partner companies. If you create new sales literature or a new training course, you associate it with the appropriate category to make it visible to the partners who need it. If you enroll a new partner, you associate it with the appropriate access groups to give it visibility to the master data it needs. For more information about working with categories and access groups, see Siebel Security Guide and Siebel eSales Administration Guide.