Products can only be shared with partners. A partner is another company in the Macaos system with whom your company has some sort of relationship. Clicking on the Partner button opens the Partner Manager, which allows you to view your existing partners and establish new partnerships. Your current partners are listed in the upper left corner.
A dollar icon indicates that the partner may place orders which are invoiced to your company. This is useful, for example, when an external design bureau designs, publishes and orders a PCB product for you. If there is no dollar icon, then your company's invoice addresses will not be listed when the partner selects an invoice address for an order. To enable or disable partner invoicing, right-click on the partner and choose Toggle invoicing.
To terminate a partnership, right-click on the partner and choose Remove partner.
Note: Terminating a partnership will not delete any existing shares with that partner. You must delete each share individually.
Requesting partnerships
The upper right region of the Partner manager is used to find new partners. This can be done in one of two ways:
By mail: You can send an e-mail to someone asking for a partnership. When they receive the e-mail, they will need to authorize the partnership by entering your company name and authorization code (from the e-mail) in the lower left region of their Partner manager. Once they have approved your request, their company will show up in your list of partners (and vice versa).
By company name: You can search for a company by name. If the company is found, a request for authorization will be sent to that company. This will appear in the Authorize new partners list (in the lower left region). The next time a user at the partner company logs in to their Macaos Enterprise, they will be notified that a partner request is waiting to be approved. Once they have approved the request, their company will show up in your list of partners (and vice versa). Note: if your prospective partner has not enabled searching (see Company settings below) then the company will not be found.
Authorizing partnerships
If you receive an e-mail requesting a partnership, you can activate the partnership by entering the company name and authorization code (from the e-mail) in the lower left region of your Partner manager. And if a partnership with your company name has been requested, you can right-click on the partner in the Authorize new partners list and choose Accept to approve the partnership.
If, for some reason, you do not wish to activate a partnership, you can choose to ignore it. Right-clicking on a partner request in the Authorize new partners list and choosing Ignore simply deletes the request from the list. If, however, the requester continues to send unwanted partnership requests you can choose Blacklist, which will prevent the requester from sending any future partnership requests to your company.
Company settings
The lower right region of the partner manager has the settings for your company. Here you can see your company name and authorization code as they will appear in an e-mail partnership request. You can change the authorization code by entering a new code and clicking on the Change button.
If Users who search for my company by name may find my company is checked, then it will be possible for others to request a partnership with your company by searching for your company name. If, for some reason, you do not wish other companies to know about your participation in the Macaos system, you should not check this box.
