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  Business Partner Integration

Use

Business partner integration affects the authorization concept .

You use business partners to link users to enterprises. Each enterprise has a business partner of the type Organization and each user has a business partner of the type Person. These business partners are linked by relationships although they are not always visible to each other.

Business partner integration enables you to transfer the user administration of external users to the appropriate partner enterprise and you can control the extent to which external users are visible to each other. An external user administrator can only create new users that belong to the same organization as him and that have the same number or fewer roles.

Prerequisites

You performed the following IMG activities under Business Partner Integration in Customizing for Collaboration Folders :

  • Make Global Settings for Organizations

    In this activity you activate business partner integration.

  • Specify System Users in cFolders

    In this activity you specify all users that are not assigned to an organization.

  • BAdI: Use New Relationship Types and Roles

    You can use this BAdI to use additional types of relationships between the business partners.

Features

Business partner integration allows you to assign users to organizations. This enables you to differentiate between internal and external users from different partner enterprises.

  • You can transfer user administration of external users to the appropriate partner enterprise.

  • You can control whether the users from the different partner enterprises are visible to each other.

  • You can use membership of an organization as a selection criterion in the user selection when assigning authorizations for objects.

    Caution Caution

    When you assign authorization for an object to a business partner of type organization, the organization is exploded into the individual users and the authorization is assigned to the users of the organization individually. It is then not possible to update or revoke the authorization at organization level: You must update or revoke the authorization of each individual user manually.

    End of the caution.

cFolders is used in a number of different system landscapes:

  • Standalone: All organizations are created in the cFolders system. Use the HR transaction PPOCE for this. Once an internal HR organization has been created, an internal business partner organization is created automatically.

    You use transaction CFXORG to assign users to organizations and check assignments. There are two scenarios for this:

    • You have been using cFolders without business partner integration so far.

    • You set cFolders up as a client of a central user administration system.

  • cFolders system and an SRM system: All organizations are read from the SRM system.

  • cFolders system and an HR system: Internal organizations are imported from the HR system to the cFolders system by ALE, external organizations are created in the cFolders system.

    You use transaction CFXORG to assign external users to organizations and check assignments. There are two scenarios for this:

    • You have been using cFolders without business partner integration so far.

    • You set cFolders up as a client of a central user administration system.