Sometimes the simplest solutions are right beneath your nose. We recently stumbled upon a way to deploy a simple Partner Portal that offers 20% of the features found in Salesforce PRM, but delivers 80% of the value (as the Pareto principle would probably dictate).

Most Salesforce.com users are already managing their partners using Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce. Our mid-market channel management portal provides these Contacts with self-service access to Salesforce information with full support for escalation rules, alerts, document management, and campaign management.

But often times all small businesses want is the ability for Partners to register Leads online and allow them to monitor/update the status of their Leads and Opportunities through a portal.

Here are the steps to take in Salesforce to deploy a "Lite" Partner Portal:

1. Ensure the Account Type picklist has a value for "Partner".
2. Create a custom Contact Lookup relationship field on the Lead and Opportunity records. Name it something like "Referring Partner Contact".
3. Map the Partner Contact Lookup fields to user defineable fields in the portal.
4. Map the Lead.Referring Contact field to the Opportunity.Referring Contact so it will persist upon conversion.

With these customizations in place, we then add the "Lite" partner portal "My Leads" and "My Opportunities" web parts to the portal "My Account" page and restrict access to these web parts to those in the "Partner" role.

Finally, a standard Web-to-Lead form is used to pre-populate the referring partners Contact ID when registering a Lead. Internally, you can simply approve/deny these Lead registrations by removing the "Referring Partner Contact" field value. Upon Lead conversion, the referring partner ID will automatically carry over to the new Opportunity.