Setting up the back office for the Customer Portal

This chapter contains information about setting up for your Customer Portal. After this setup is complete, customers will be able to browse your catalog, review documents and interactions, request invoice reprints, and more.

This table shows the necessary setup tasks. For multi-site implementation, the table shows whether to perform each step in the Primary Site, all sites, or only desired sites. If your implementation has only one site, then that is the Primary Site.

Description Back office form For multi-site, perform in...
Set up the site group. Site Groups

Portal Parameters

Primary Site
Define replication rules. Required for multi-site implementations. Replication Rules All sites
Specify the forms database Sites/Entities All sites
Set up items and categories for your product catalog. Items

Item Categories

Item Category Workbench

Portal Parameters

Related Item Reason Codes

Multi-Lingual Items

Primary Site
Set up portal catalogs. (Optional) Portal Catalogs

Portal Catalog Workbench

Portal Catalog Build Utility

Customer Types

Customers

Portal Parameters

Primary Site
Set up information about the customer’s company. Customers

Customer Ship-Tos

All sites
Set up contact information for your company. General Parameters

Salespersons

Employees or Vendors

Customer Ship-Tos

All sites
Set up to manage consigned inventory. (Optional) Warehouses

Item/Warehouse

All sites from which consigned inventory is provided
Set up documents. (Optional) Groups

Document Types

Attached Documents

All sites
Set up interactions. (Optional) Employees

Interaction Topics

All sites
Specify country codes for the Vertex tax system. (Optional) Tax Interface Parameters All sites
Set up language-independent aging bucket labels. Accounts Receivable Parameters All sites
Set up a default bank code. Accounts Receivable Parameters All sites
Set up ISO-based currency codes. Currency Codes All sites
Maintain ISO unit of measure codes. Unit of Measure Codes All sites
Enable viewing of service knowledge base entries. Knowledge Base All sites
Add portal-enabled user accounts. See Setting up portal user accounts All sites
Allow portal users to reprint invoices. (Optional) Accounts Receivable Parameters

Intranets

Report Options

All sites
Set up event notifications:
  • Activate workflow event handlers.
  • Subscribe users to publications.
  • Specify the forms database. (Optional)
  • Configure order shipping alerts.
  • Assign users to event global constants.
  • Choose whether to use rich HTML-portal email. (Optional)
Workflow Event Handler Activation

Publication Subscribers

Sites/Entities

Event Triggers

Event Global Constants

Portal Parameters

Portal Manager

All sites
Set up online ordering. See Setting up the back office for online ordering