I have a couple of questions regarding the use of the customer portal / partner portal / force.com sites – as it pertains to an ISV/OEM and channel partner self-service.
Background:
a. We are an ISV/OEM in the process of building a standalone native application embedded in force.com WITHOUT any integration into SFDC CRM objects.
b. Our application will be created as a managed package using the “Distributed Org” model (where our customers can install the application into their own production environments / orgs).
c. We plan on using the CRM for ISV with the 2 free Enterprise Edition licenses with the LMA installed to track licenses of our Trialforce downloads and our live production customers.
Application:Our customers manufacture parts, and distribute them thru distributors/resellers. Our goal is to have these distributors/resellers login (username + password), to our native application installed at our customers orgs so that the distributors/resellers can view their data stored in the custom objects of our application.
Scenarios:
Reseller ABC logs into our Customer 123 to view their data stored in custom objects
Reseller ABC logs into our Customer 456 to view their data stored in custom objects
Reseller DEF logs into our Customer 456 to view their data stored in custom objects
Questions: (Please note: These questions are from the perspective of a Salesforce.com ISV/OEM ecosystem partner).
1) In order to achieve the scenarios described above for our application, should we use the SFDC delivered customer portal, partner portal, force.com sites, self-service. Will any of these work?? OR do we have to build our own portal type solution as a part of our delivered application??
2) If 1 of our customers (eg Customer 123) has 10 employees that use our application internally and 1000 distributors that login to view (read-only) their data, and the license fee charged by SFDC is $15/user/month for the “combined solution” (i.e. force.com + our native app), does that mean we (as the SFDC ISV/OEM partner) have to pay salesforce.com $150/month + $15,000/month for a total of $15150/month….. – (btw: at this point our solution won’t sell). OR do we have to pay SFDC $150/month for the 10 internal employees that use our application?
I have combed thru the help documentation, partner portal info + discussion forums and have been unable to find any concrete information that sheds light on a solution & pricing, that enables an ISV/OEM’s customer(s) to allow their channel partners (ie distributors/resellers) to login via the web into the ISV’s native application to view data stored in custom objects.
Thank you kindly.
