Standard IAM Business Processes: B2B / Partner Portal

This document introduces best practices for managing users, identity attributes and entitlements in a typical Extranet Partner /B2B web portal:

1. The focus is on organizations who wish to manage a portal that will be accessed by large numbers of users, each of whom is affiliated with a partner of the hosting organization.
2. There may be thousands of partner organizations and hundreds of thousands of users.
3. Each portal user is affiliated with exactly one partner organization.
4. The relationship between the hosting organization and each of its partners is presumably established out of band, before any of a partner's users are on-boarded.
5. Partner users are likely to be infrequent users of the portal.
6. Partners cannot be counted on to reliably or promptly deactivate the access of their own users to the portal.
7. It is desirable to enable each partner to manage their own user population on the portal.
8. A central support team should be able to assist with onboarding, deactivation, login problems, password resets, etc. where the partner's support team cannot or will not.
9. The variety and complexity of security entitlements assigned to each partner user and change management processes are significantly less than for internal users in hosting organization.