What’s Partner Access?
You’re the owner of your Cornerstone system or “portal”. Without your permission, we as your consulting partner cannot access anything in your portal. To support you during an implementation project or with any consulting needs, we kindly ask you to provide us access to your portal.
This access can be granted — and, of course, also be rejected — using the so-called Partner Access Administration. In this knowledge article we quickly want to provide you an overview on how to use this functionality.
What’s a portal?
You as a Cornerstone client have access to at least three so-called “portals” or “environments”: production, pilot and stage. Each “portal” or “environment” is an individual and independent Cornerstone system with exactly the same functionality. During our collaboration we will in detail work on what’s the purpose of each of these portals, however, it’s important to understand, that access can be granted to individual portals (like only for pilot) or all portals.
The steps described in the following sections on how to work with Partner Access Administration need to be repeated on each and every portal that you grant us access to. It’s not sufficient to just perform the steps on one portal (production, for example), as any changes to Partner Access Administration will not get transferred automatically to the other portals (pilot and stage in our example). Therefore, we kindly ask you to repeat the steps described below on each portal.
To access the portals, you simply open them in your web browser. If the name of your Cornerstone portal is example, you can reach your various portals under the following URLs:
- Production: https://example.csod.com/
- Pilot: https://example-pilot.csod.com/
- Stage: https://example-stg.csod.com/
Please note, that your company might have additional portals on top of these standards portals. If this is the case, please also remember to grant access to those other portals as well.
How to initially setup Partner Access?
Please follow the following steps for granting us access to your portal:
- To grant us access to your portal, please open the portal and logon as an administrator. You should have received administrator credentials directly from Cornerstone, if you’re a new Cornerstone client, or you may need to reach out to your internal administrator team.
- In the Cornerstone portal, please open the menu and go to Admin and Tools. Please note, that these are the names of the menu and the menu item in an out-of-the-box Cornerstone portal. If your portal is already in use, this naming might have been updated or changed.
- Afterwards please click on Core Functions and then on Partner Access Administration to get a list of all Cornerstone partners, whom you so far granted access to your portal.
- To add a new partner, please click the button Add Partner on the upper right corner of the screen.
- A popup window will appear, in which you enter the email address of your talessio consultant, i.e. [email protected], and then press Next. Your Cornerstone portal will now communication with the Cornerstone partner database and will verify, whether the partner you’re going to add is a certified Cornerstone partner according to the Cornerstone partner requirements.
- If the validation is successful, another popup will show up, in which you can specify a date, up to which the partner shall have access to your portal. Click Save after specifying the date. After this date, the access will automatically be rejected. You can, however, re-grant the access afterwards at any point of time. During the initial setup of Partner Access, please choose a date, that allows us to effectively collaborate with you.
Cornerstone will now directly send the credentials to the partner, you don’t have to do anything else.
How to extend the access to your portal?
If the partner access expired, i.e. the access to your portal was automatically rejected due to the date you specified according to the description before, we might ask you to extend the access to continue working with you. To do that, please follow these steps:
- Please again open the portal and logon as an administrator.
- In the Cornerstone portal, please open the menu and go to Admin and Tools. As noted before, in an already configured portal, the names of these menu items might have been updated.
- Afterwards please click on Core Functions and then on Partner Access Administration to get a list of all Cornerstone partners, whom you so far granted access to your portal. If the list is empty, please do click the checkbox Include inactive partners to see the full list. For the account, for which you want to extend the access, please click on the three dots on the right side and choose Re-Enable Access.
- In the back, Cornerstone will again check with the Cornerstone partner database, whether the partner is still certified according to Cornerstone standards and requirements. If so, the popup to enter a date will appear, in which — just as in the initial setup — you can specify, how long the partner shall have access to your portal. Click Re-Enable Access to finish this step.
The partner will again receive new credentials directly from Cornerstone.
How to disable access to portal immediately?
While the access to your portal automatically expires based on the date you specified when initially setting up or extending partner access, you can also at any point of time reject the access to your portal with immediate effect. To do so, please follow these steps:
- Please again open the portal and logon as an administrator.
- In the Cornerstone portal, please open the menu and go to Admin and Tools. As noted before, in an already configured portal, the names of these menu items might have been updated.
- Afterwards please click on Core Functions and then on Partner Access Administration to get a list of all Cornerstone partners, whom you so far granted access to your portal. For the account you want to reject access, please click on the three dots on the right side and choose the option End Access.
The partner will no longer be able to access your portal.
How to reset a partner’s password?
We do keep good care of our credentials. But sometimes it might happen, we forget a password or something does not work out. In this case, you can reset our password. To do so, please follow these steps:
- Please again open the portal and logon as an administrator.
- In the Cornerstone portal, please open the menu and go to Admin and Tools. As noted before, in an already configured portal, the names of these menu items might have been updated.
- Afterwards please click on Core Functions and then on Partner Access Administration to get a list of all Cornerstone partners, whom you so far granted access to your portal. For the account you want to reset the password for, please click on the three dots on the right side and choose the option Send Forgot Password Email.
The partner will automatically receive an email to reset the password of this account.
Common Problems
If, for any reason, the initial setup or the extension of Partner Access do not work, the most likely reason for this is, that the email address of the partner is already stored with another account in your portal. To verify and change that, please perform the following steps:
- Please again open the portal and logon as an administrator.
- In the Cornerstone portal, please open the menu and go to Admin and Users. As noted before, in an already configured portal, the names of these menu items might have been updated.
- In the field Email please enter the email address of the partner and hit Search.
- If there is a search result showing up, click on the name on the name on the left side and on the following screen on the button Edit Record on the bottom right corner. Search for the field Email Address and remove or update the address. Pressing Save on the bottom right corner should resolve any issues with Partner Access.
If after that you still have issues, please feel free to reach out to us at any point of time. We’re happy to assist and we’re looking forward to working with you.