Set up Partner Community in Salesforce Communities

A partner portal allows partner users to log in to Salesforce through a separate website than your non-partner users. Partner users can only see the data that you have made available to them.

There are two types of users for partner portals: channel managers and partner users.

• Channel managers are the internal users who manage your partner accounts and partner users. Before setting up a partner community, identify an internal user to play the channel manager role.
• Partner users are Salesforce users with limited capabilities. They are external to your organization but sell your products or services through indirect sales channels. They are associated with a particular partner account, have limited access to your organization's data, and log in via a partner portal.

Prerequisites

1. Partner Community User Licenses: In order to enable communities in your org for the first time, you must have relevant licenses, which can be visible in Company Information page. For more information about Communities User Licenses, check the link below:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=users_license_types_communities.htm&language=en_US&type=0

2. Set up a Channel Manager: Ideally, channel managers should create all the partner accounts for the partner organizations they manage. All partner users associated with a partner account automatically fall below the channel manager in the partner role hierarchy. So all the data owned by those partner users rolls up and is visible to the channel manager.

Create a Channel Manager Profile. In my case, I cloned with existing Standard User profile. Then create a user and assign the role and profile which we have created.

Manage External Users user permission is required to manage partner portal users, so assign this permission to the profile. For more info, check the link below:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000213565&type=1

To enable the enhanced profile user interface, from Setup, enter User Interface in the Quick Find box, then select User Interface, then select Enable Enhanced Profile User Interface and click Save.

Steps

Step 1: Enable Communities from Communities Settings page.

Step 2: Click on New Community button from All Communities page.

Step 3: Choose the community template. Ok, lets select Partner Central.

Step 4: Enter details and then click on Create button.

Step 5: Partner Portal community is created.

Step 6: Clone Partner Community User Profile from Profiles page. Give a name, in my case Partner Portal Community Profile.

For each cloned profile, ensure that the "API Only User" permission is not selected. Users associated with this permission selected aren’t able to log in to their communities.

Step 7: Navigate Partner Portal community workspace --> Administration --> Members. Add the profile created and Save the changes.

Step 8: Click Settings under Administration. Click on Activate Community.

Step 9: Navigate Community Builder --> Publish.

Step 10: To create a partner account, visit account detail page of any account. Click Manage External Account and then, click Enable as Partner.

Step 11: To create a partner user, view the partner account for which you want to create a partner user, and select a contact. On the contact detail page, click Manage External User and choose Enable Partner User.

Step 12: Assign the User License and Profile as shown below. Click Save.

The partner user role is automatically assigned based on the account name.

Partner user gets created. He will receive an email. Once he resets the password, the browser will redirect him to the partner community page.