Partner Channel Management – THE way to engage your partners
Note that “SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Portal Service” is rebranded to SAP Cloud Platform Portal in March 2017.
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We all know and understand the value of partners. Partners can serve as multipliers of your business if they are managed in an effective way. You can utilize partners to create an ecosystem around your business. And everyone wants to increase their business.
But it’s not that easy, right?
With the new Partner Channel Management Accelerator presented by the HCP Portal team, we try to make it a bit easier.
A little over a year ago we have presented the previous version of the Partner Chanel Management. We are now providing a newer version with enhanced capabilities that includes
- Better support in mobile experience
- Support for SAPUI5 and OData
- Enhanced capabilities for the administer and better theme integration
- The ability to create your site template and edit it in SAP Web IDE so that the Administrator can reuse it to create the site.
- And yes, we provide it as open source so you can modify it and tailor it to your needs.
If you read my previous blog on Support Site and the blog by Amit Maimon on accelerating your HCP cloud portal, you can see a pattern here. We are sharing it all with you so you can make it work in the best way for you needs.
Partner Channel Management Accelerator
Partner management is a journey, from invitation, registration and onboarding to creating opportunities and actually making the deals happen in order to create benefit for both sides. Your business is unique and requires specific needs, the Partner Channel Management Accelerator will provide you with a kick start to build your own solution.
The solution is integrated with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C) in order to provide the relevant data from the system.
The solution is built on top of the HCP portal service to allow you creating a site that is role managed, with usage of Fiori Launchpad and integration with SAP Web IDE in order to allow you to create the site for your own need.
So what does it include?
- Invitation and Registration – you can invite your partners to register on your portal. Once the registration is complete, you can get started. The invitation and Registration service is integrated with SCI (SAP Cloud Identity)
- Leads – first of all you can see all the leads and filter them.
- Opportunities – you can review all the opportunities and drill down to get the specific details for each opportunity.
- You can see all appointments and tasks
- And you can Register Deals – Bingo J
Not too bad to get started with, hah?
So how do I get it?
The Partner Management Accelerator is provided as an open source in GitHub. Follow the link, download it, and carefully follow the instructions on the Readme file. Pay special attention to the configuration. And make sure you create the users in the portal and not in the C4C backend.
Prerequisites
In order to run the solution you will need:
HCP Productive Account (the solution doesn’t work on trial), Portal service enabled, SCI tenant and C4C tenant.
Good luck and let us know what you think,
Rachel.
Links:
GitHub: https://github.com/SAP/hcp-portal-service-for-pcm
SAP Cloud for Customer – User Guide https://help.sap.com/cloud4customer
SAP Cloud for Customer – Administrator Guide https://help.sap.com/cloud4customer
Integration Guide INTEGRATION: Extending SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer
SAP reference solutions in GitHub is so refreshing. Well done!
Looking forward to see there community commits.
Great update on PCM, thanks Rachel.
Hi Rachel,
we are trying to set this PCM up in our environment. However we are facing some issues. Is there a documentation available on how the process flow is ?
Does a new partner to start with the self registration first ? Or does the process start with a portal user that invites others ? We only found a very brief section in the C4C help but that didn’t help too much. Also the callback from the C4C to the portal is not working. So for the invitation callback is there any additional prerequisite on the portal to support the webservice call from C4C ?
Another question is: Do we need to get the signed certificate from SAP support site ? We were trying that (certifictae is automatically installed in the browser) but after installing the key it in the IDP API section we were no longer able to logon to the IDP.
Where can we get more help on this ? Our SAP contacts are also a bit helpless….
Hi Marcus,
Are the instructions on the movie of how to set PCM helpful:
https://youtu.be/9awGnMUcuAk.
If not, please open a ticket and we will provide the information.
Rachel.
Hi Rachel Kahana Samet,
Is this feature "Partner Channel Management" portal still valid? In the SAP Sales Cloud Solution Guide document Channel Partner Management Portal is marked as Obselete. Are these Gib hub links are still valid or better build based on BTP development tools ?
Screen print taken from solution guide sap sales cloud
Is SCI mandatory for PCM to work or is it needed for "Invitation and Registration" only? Can we implement PCM without an invitation and registration process?
Hi Stefan
SCI is SAP’s Identity Provider (IdP), and is used for user management and SSO. You can use other vendors’ IdP solution.
The invitation process in PCM is recommended as each partner user has costs in C4C and hence by design we believe that an invite is better than self registration as there should be some mechanism to add partners with care.
I hope this addressed your question. Please reply in case additional clarification is needed.
Iris.
Hi Iris,
thanks for the information.
Can you tell me if it is possible to install the component "pcmapps" on HCP and call it from a SAP on premise portal? We would like to use an existing on prem portal rather than the portal service on HCP.
If this is possible, can we also set up the logon procedure between the on prem portal and the HCP component using SAML2.0?
BR, Stefan
Hi Stefan,
Theoretically, you should be able to get the pcmapps from github, open them in WebIDE and deploy them to the java stack.
You can try to do that, please note it was not tested and not officially supported so it may require some effort, but it seems it would be a nice accelerator to add these apps to EP.
Iris.
Hi Rachel,
Just want to understand the backend trust communication during partner flow between HCP and C4C. Does HCP connect to C4C using C4C user ID or email to get the respective partner data? When the partner registration is approved, does their user get generated in C4C automatically?
Hi Parker
Yes, CP PCM connects to C4C using a C4C user that is created when the partner is approved
Thanks
Iris.
Hi Rachel,
What is the added value/benefits with partners accessing C4C thru HCP, When partners/partner contacts can directly access C4C using partner specific business roles (partner manager, partner contact) without HCP?
What about integration of Cloud portal integration with Hybris cloud for sales?
Regards,
Srini
Hi Srini,
Cloud Platform Portal allows you to provide a customized experience to your partners, you can create a branded site that can be customized, you can add there additional capabilities for your needs. The experience you get is mobile ready, it can easily be translated, etc.
In complex scenarios, Cloud Portal can integrate with additional SAP and non SAP software.
The out of the box solution is built for Cloud for Customers. If there is a need for additional out of the box content for for Cloud for Sales it may be considered in the future
Regards,
Iris