How to use the partner center
Partner Center is for ISOPlanner partners and resellers that work for several organizations, each with its own ISOPlanner environment. It gives your firm one place to see all of your customers: how each one is doing, who works there, which licenses and frameworks they have, and a way into their environment. This article explains how an organization becomes your customer, what the Partner pages show, the two ways to open a customer, and what to do when something is greyed out or refused.
In short: ISOPlanner registers your organization as a partner. An organization becomes your customer when it appoints one of your people as its Consultant, when it started its trial from your partner link, or when ISOPlanner support links it to you. Your customers appear under Partner > Customer management and on the Partner dashboard. To open a customer you need two things: a management role (Admin or Manager) with a license in your own organization, and a licensed guest account with the same email address in the customer's environment. Clicking a customer's name shows a read-mostly dashboard of that customer inside your own session; Log in to customer opens the customer's environment for real, in a new tab, signed in as your guest account there.
Before you start
- Your organization must be registered as a partner by ISOPlanner. You cannot switch this on yourself. When it is, the Administration > Subscription page says: "This organization is registered as a partner of ISOPlanner."
- You need the Admin or Manager role in your own organization, with a license. An organization administrator of a parent organizational unit qualifies too. The Consultant role does not: a consultant at a partner is licensed, but must not see the partner's other customers.
- Your role must have the Partner module switched on. An administrator does this under Administration > Users > Permissions, under Role permissions: open the role and switch on Partner ("This switches the Partner menu item on and off"). The Partner group in the menu appears only when all three conditions above hold.
- For every customer you want to open, you need a guest account with your current email address in that customer's environment, with a license. The customer creates it: invite you as a guest in their Microsoft Entra directory, then add you under Administration > Users > Licensing with a license. The Consultant instructions link on the customer's Roles tab opens a PDF with these steps for the customer.
- Log in to customer also requires that the customer has a linked Microsoft Entra directory. A customer that was created but never signed in has none yet.
- A customer dashboard cannot be opened while you are working in one of your own organizational units. Switch back to your main organization first. The list and the partner dashboard work from any unit.
- Partner Center is not tied to a subscription type. A firm that runs no management system of its own can hold the Portal subscription: its Start page then shows Portal environment and the environment offers user administration and Partner Center only.
1. How an organization becomes your customer
Every customer carries exactly one partner. That link is the only thing that lets you see or open the customer: not a shared email domain, not the campaign your customer came from, not the directory it lives in. There are three ways the link gets made.
The customer appoints one of your people as consultant
This is the customer's own way of choosing you. An administrator at the customer opens Administration > Users > Roles and adds your colleague under Consultants. The picker offers only people who already have a licensed guest account in the customer's environment and who hold a licensed account at a registered partner. Saving the role links the customer to your organization. The Consultant role is free for the customer: "These users have the same rights as the Manager role and therefore have full access except to administrative tasks. This role does not count towards the number of licenses used in your subscription."
Once a customer works with one partner, its picker offers only that partner's people. Appointing is refused when the person holds no licensed account at any partner, when the person holds accounts at more than one partner, when the customer already works with another partner, and when the organization is itself a partner. Section "Questions and troubleshooting" lists the exact messages.
The customer started from your partner link
ISOPlanner gives you a partner trial link that carries a source code identifying your organization. An organization that starts its trial from that link is linked to you from the first minute, and your packages are made available to it during onboarding. An existing organization that has no partner yet and visits the same link is linked to you as well. Once an organization has a partner, the link no longer changes it.
Linked by ISOPlanner support
ISOPlanner support can link a customer to your organization directly, for example when a customer signed up without your link. Ask for this with the customer's name and the email address of an administrator there.
When the link ends
The link follows the consultants. When the customer removes the Consultant role from the last of your people, it has withdrawn the relation: the customer disappears from your Customer management list and from your partner dashboard, and the customer is free to work with another partner. A link made by ISOPlanner support before any consultant existed stays until support clears it.
2. Customer management
Partner > Customer management lists every customer linked to your organization, with a row of tiles above the list. Everything on this page describes the customer as an organization: who works there, what they pay for, which frameworks they run. It never shows the content of a customer's management system.
The tiles
| Tile | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Licensed users | Every active user with a license across all your customers, paid and free roles alike. |
| Paid licenses | The management licenses of the customers that pay: not in trial, not suspended, subscription not ended. This is the number to reconcile your invoices against. A trial customer has licenses too, but is not counted here. |
| Logins | A bar per day for the last seven days: how many users last logged in on that day. |
| Newest customer | The most recently created customer, with its creation date and its number of licenses. The name opens the customer dashboard; the sign-in icon next to it is Log in to customer. |
The list
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Name | The customer. The name is a link to the customer dashboard (section 3). Resting the pointer on the row shows a sign-in icon for Log in to customer when the customer has a linked directory. |
| Created | When the customer's environment was created. |
| Last login | The most recent login of any user at the customer. |
| Subscription | The customer's subscription type. |
| Status | One lifecycle status per customer; see "The statuses at a glance". |
| Licenses | Management licenses bought, with the number in use between brackets. The cell turns red when more paid roles are in use than licenses were bought, because that difference is what gets invoiced. |
| Trial start | The start of the customer's trial, when there was one. |
| Suspended | Whether ISOPlanner has suspended the customer. |
| Active frameworks | The frameworks the customer actively runs, named after the ISO standard even when the customer renamed its own copy. Three are shown; the rest is counted. |
Search and filter
The search box Filter on keyword matches every text in a row. The Filter button opens a callout with the subscription types, the customer statuses and the standards. The status filter uses the same single value the Status column shows, so what you filter on is what you read back in the grid. The standards filter matches on active frameworks only, so a customer that installed a framework and deactivated it does not match. The line next to the filter counts how many of your customers match.
The actions
Select a row first; the command bar acts on the selected customer.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Users | Opens a read-only list of the customer's users: Name, Email, Last login, License and Roles. You cannot change anything here; use Log in to customer for that. |
| Log in to customer | Opens the customer's environment in a new tab (section 3). Needs a customer with a linked directory. |
3. Open a customer
There are two ways in, and they are different things. The customer dashboard shows you one customer's key figures inside your own session, without signing in anywhere else. Log in to customer takes you into the customer's environment itself. Both are guarded by the same two rules, and ISOPlanner checks them before it navigates, so a refusal is explained in a dialog titled Cannot open customer instead of failing halfway.
- You hold the Admin or Manager role, with a license, in your own partner organization.
- A licensed account with your current email address exists in the customer's environment. That is the guest account the customer created for you.
The customer dashboard
Click the customer's name in the list, or in the Newest customer tile. The page shows the customer's name with the subtitle "Overview of this customer" and a dashboard that ISOPlanner creates on your first visit: Environment overview, one framework coverage widget per ISO framework the customer has installed, risk status, task status, open tasks per user and overdue tasks per user. The dashboard belongs to the customer, so a colleague who opens the same customer sees the same dashboard, and it is shown in the customer's own default language.
Environment overview is the tile that exists only here: the number of Users, Active (30 days), Licenses in use against bought, Last login, the customer's Administrators with their email addresses, and a Log in to customer button when the customer has a linked directory.
You may add, configure, resize, reorder and remove widgets on this dashboard, and the changes are kept for everyone who opens it. Only widgets about this one customer are offered: nothing personal ("my tasks"), nothing across organizations, and not the Microsoft secure scores widget, whose figures come from a Microsoft directory and would describe yours rather than the customer's. Use the back arrow in the page header to return to the list.
What the customer dashboard is not
While you look at a customer this way, you are still signed in to your own organization. ISOPlanner re-points the dashboard's requests at the customer and treats you there as the guest account with your email address, so you see what that account may see and nothing more. Everything outside the dashboard is deliberately switched off: links on the widgets do not navigate (the risk or task they point at lives in the customer, and a link in your session would open your own environment), the AI assistant panel is hidden, and user photos are not loaded. To work in the customer, use Log in to customer.
Log in to customer
Available from the command bar, from the sign-in icon on a customer row, from the Newest customer tile, from the Environment overview widget and from every bar you click on the partner dashboard. ISOPlanner checks the two rules and then opens a new tab that signs you in to the customer's Microsoft Entra directory as the guest you are there. From that moment you are in the customer's environment like any of its users, with the rights of your guest account: a consultant works as a manager, a plain user reads. Your actions there are recorded under your guest account in the customer's change log.
The customer also appears in your account menu under Switch organization (unit), because an account with your email address exists there. Switching from the account menu is the same sign-in as Log in to customer, without the check up front.
5. The Partner dashboard
Partner > Dashboard compares your customers side by side. The same content is available as the Partner tab of your Start page. Every widget here is a "per customer" widget: one bar per customer, so a customer that is behind stands out.
| Widget | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Risk status per customer | The status of risks in a bar chart. |
| Risk changes per customer | The number of selected risk changes per period. |
| Risk owners per customer | The owners of risks. |
| Requirement and control status per customer | The status and applicability of requirements and controls for one framework. |
| Requirement and control changes per customer | The number of selected requirement and control changes per period. |
| Document approval status per customer | The document approval status for selected document categories. |
| Task status per customer | The task status per customer. A second instance, Overdue tasks per customer, shows only overdue tasks. |
| User statistics per customer | The number of users per role and activity statistics. |
On your first visit ISOPlanner creates one dashboard with all of these widgets and all customers selected. The requirement and control status widget starts on ISO 27001:2022 when any customer runs it and on the first framework alphabetically otherwise, and is left out when no customer runs a framework yet. The document approval widget is left out when your customers have no document lists yet. You can add up to eight dashboards of this type, and every widget is configured through its own panel: Select the customers to show chooses the customers (Select all items for all of them), and the framework picker on the requirement and control widgets offers the frameworks your customers run, not the frameworks your own organization has installed. Only widgets of the Customer category exist on this dashboard, and those exist nowhere else. Partner dashboards cannot be shared with other people.
Clicking a bar opens that customer with Log in to customer, on the page the widget is about: the risks, the controls, the tasks. The same two rules apply, and a refusal is shown as a notification.
Hidden customers
The widgets show a customer only when a licensed account with your email address exists there. Customers where you have no such account are left out of every widget, without an error, so a chart can show fewer bars than you have customers. The page says so above the widgets: "3 customers are hidden because your account has no license there." Ask those customers for a guest account, and the bars appear. The list on Customer management and its tiles are not affected: they describe the customer as an organization and show every linked customer.
6. For your customer: appointing a consultant
Send this to the administrator of a customer who wants to give you access. The Consultant instructions link on their Roles tab opens the same steps as a PDF.
- Invite the consultant as a guest in your Microsoft Entra directory, with the email address they use at their firm.
- In ISOPlanner, open Administration > Users > Licensing and add the guest with a license.
- Open the Roles tab, type the consultant's name under Consultants and select them. Only people at registered partners with a licensed account in your environment are offered.
- Save. The consultant works as a manager in your environment, free of charge, and their firm can now see your organization in its Partner Center.
To end the relation, remove the Consultant role again. When the last consultant from that firm is removed, the firm loses Partner Center access to your organization and you can appoint a consultant from another firm.
The statuses at a glance
Customers
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active customer | Paying and able to log in: not in trial, not suspended, subscription not ended. Counted in Paid licenses. |
| In trial | In its trial period. Its licenses are not counted in Paid licenses. |
| Trial expired | The trial ended without a subscription. Users can no longer log in. |
| Subscription ended | The subscription was cancelled and its end date has passed. |
| Suspended | ISOPlanner has suspended the environment. It cannot be opened, not even by its partner. |
Packages, per customer
| Status | Meaning | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| Not available | The customer does not see the package in its Store. | Check the package and Save. |
| Available | The customer sees the package in its Store and can order it. | The customer orders, or you click Available, set to ordered. Not offered for a preview package. |
| Ordered | Ordered but not yet paid. The package can no longer be unchecked. | You click Ordered, set to paid once the invoice is settled. |
| Paid | Paid; the customer can activate it. | The customer activates the package in its Store. |
| Activated, Installing | The customer has activated the package and its content is being, or has been, installed. | Nothing for you to do. |
Questions and troubleshooting
I do not see the Partner group in the menu
Three things have to be true at once. Your organization is registered as a partner (check the text on Administration > Subscription). You hold the Admin or Manager role with a license; a Consultant, a License Manager or a normal user does not see the group. And your role has the Partner module switched on under Administration > Users > Permissions > Role permissions. If the first is missing, ask ISOPlanner support; the other two are for your administrator.
Cannot open customer: You need a paid manager license (Admin or Manager) in your partner organization
You are trying to open a customer, but in your own organization you do not hold Admin or Manager, or you hold it without a license. Being a Consultant at your own firm is not enough. Ask your administrator for the role and a license, then sign in again.
Cannot open customer: Your account is not registered with a license in this customer environment
The customer has no licensed account with your current email address. Either the customer never created your guest account, or it exists without a license, or it was created under another email address. Ask the customer to add you under Administration > Users > Licensing with a license, with the email address you sign in with. Section 6 has the steps you can send them.
This customer does not have a linked Microsoft Entra directory yet and cannot be opened
Log in to customer signs you in to the customer's directory, and this customer has none linked yet: its environment was created but nobody has signed in to it. The customer's own administrator has to sign in once. The customer dashboard does not need a directory and still works.
You are working in an organizational unit. Switch back to your main organization to open a customer dashboard
A customer dashboard and an organizational unit cannot be active at the same time, so while you work in one of your own units the customer names in the list are plain text and this message appears if you reach a customer dashboard by its address. Switch to your main organization in the account menu and try again. Log in to customer is not affected.
Customers are hidden because my account has no license there
The partner dashboard reveals a customer's figures only where a licensed account with your email address exists. The message counts the customers that are left out of every widget for that reason. Ask each of those customers for a guest account with a license; the bars appear as soon as it exists. The Customer management list shows all customers regardless.
The widget's framework list does not show my frameworks
That is intended. The requirement and control widgets on the partner dashboard describe your customers, so their framework picker lists the frameworks the selected customers run. Your own organization's frameworks have nothing to do with it. If the list is empty, none of the selected customers has activated a framework yet.
Log in to customer is greyed out
Select one customer first. The action stays greyed out for a customer without a linked Microsoft Entra directory; see above.
A customer is missing from the list
The list shows only organizations that are linked to your partner organization. A customer that signed up without your partner link and has not appointed one of your people as consultant is not linked, even when you work with them daily. Have the customer appoint a consultant (section 6) or ask ISOPlanner support to link them. A customer that removed the last of your consultants has withdrawn the link deliberately.
My customer cannot add my colleague as consultant
The customer's administrator sees one of four messages when saving the role.
- "... does not have a licensed account at a partner organization and cannot be added as a consultant." Your colleague has no licensed account in your partner organization under that email address. Add them there first, with a license.
- "... has an account at more than one partner organization. Ask support to set the partner for this organization first." Your colleague holds accounts at two partner firms, and ISOPlanner will not guess which firm gets access to the customer's data. ISOPlanner support links the customer to the right partner; after that the appointment works.
- "This organization already works with ... Remove those consultants first to switch to another partner." The customer is linked to another partner, named in the message. A customer has one partner at a time; the customer removes that partner's consultants first.
- "A partner organization cannot appoint a consultant from another partner organization." The organization trying to appoint is itself a partner. A partner is never the customer of another partner.
Can a consultant at my firm use Partner Center?
No. Someone who works at your firm as an external consultant, with the Consultant role in your own organization, is licensed there but does not see the Partner group and cannot open your customers. Partner Center is for the Admin and Manager roles of the partner organization.