Partitioned Customer Portals

[SimonW@GriffinIT]

Hey all,

I've been recently migrating a number of customers to RP38 and have come across a number of issues with the Customer Portal & partitioning. With the introduction of the Shared Services functionality in RP33, partitioning data has been relocated from being stored on the portal pages to the session data. This is fine if you use the portal based on the partition of the Customer/Support Officer logging calls there, but if you have a Customer Portal with functionality defined by what partition you are logging into, all of that functionality no longer has a parameter to refer to in deciding what functionality to display or not display.

To give an example, we have a client whose IT Service Desk is PARTITION 0 and their Facilities Management Service Desk is PARTITION 1. The Customer Portal is customised so that the Activity Summary lists on the dashboard, the call totals in the sidebar, and the options of which Log an Incident screens are available were all tied to the PARTITION value. To define which partition of the Customer Portal you wished to log into, the URL to the portal is modified to:

http://server/SystemName/infraEnterprise.aspx?Lite&DATABASE=SystemName&PARTITION=1

This URL would then log the Customer into the Facilities Management (PARTITION 1) version of the Customer Portal.

With RP33+ the PARTITION value is no longer stored on page, and therefore can no longer be the defining factor for functionality in the individual pages.

I am writing this so that you are all aware that this is an issue for any of you that have customised the Customer Portal in a similar manner to this. The issue has been raised with EMC, but the response to this will be slow in the coming. However, they have presented me with a couple of options for a workaround to this issue. I will keep you up to date with how I go with this, and will eventually post my solution.

Cheers

SimonW