At Liferay, we hear over and over from our customers that partners are a critical component of their success. To that end, being able to deliver an exceptional partner experience is just as important as the customer experience. By becoming easy to work with, companies can nurture loyalty with their partners and create more successful relationships.

Alaaeldin El-Nattar, COO of Rivet Logic, shared how Dropbox is managing its growing partner ecosystem while equipping partners with the tools they need to succeed.

Dropbox started in 2007 as a simple way for people to easily share their files wherever they are. Today, they have over 500 million users and over 300,000 teams using Dropbox Business. This large, global footprint means that they need to manage a rapidly growing global partner network. In order to have a robust partner experience, they needed a way to streamline their management.

Ensuring the Success of a Global Partner Network

One of the key challenges Dropbox faced was that they had no centralized solution for their 7,000 partners. They were also still relying on tedious manual web forms for deal registration and for creating support tickets, which lead to high turnaround times. Finally, their sales enablement was limited, with no access to sales and marketing resources or training materials to help their partners succeed.

Dropbox decided on the following requirements for their partner portal:

• The solution needed to be flexible and customizable so that they could evolve as expectations changed.
• The new portal also needed to streamline and automate processes, especially when it comes to onboarding new partners.
• Self service options were a must, so that partners had the tools they needed, right when they needed them without having to wait on Dropbox to help them.

Dropbox started looking for a SaaS product, but found that the lack of platform flexibility would limit their ability to cater to their partners unique requirements. The team considered an in-house application instead, but feared that it would be difficult to maintain, enhance or add new features.

When Rivet Logic suggested Liferay DXP, Dropbox realized that this was the best of both options: a customizable platform that came with foundational components so that they weren’t starting from scratch.

“When people say ‘buy versus build,’ no one talks about the in-between,” said El-Nattar. “That’s what Liferay enables us to do.”

Designing the Right User Experience

Delivering an incredible user interface and user experience was a high priority for Dropbox. Although they have their own internal UX team, they leaned on Rivet Logic’s Liferay expertise to understand the best way to develop their ideas within Liferay’s platform, ensuring that the implementation maximized the out-of-the-box features.

There were many features that made the new portal successful for Dropbox, such as:

• Centralized access to resources and tools
• Localized experience based on regions
• Role-based content targeting
• Seamless integration with back-end systems
• Self service capabilities for common tasks such as registering new deals and request support. The portal combines intuitive user interfaces with integrated workflows, so that partners can easily accomplish a task without having to be trained on the process.

The new partner portal was also built with scalable designs that aligned with Liferay’s road map to ensure longevity of the solution. In addition to the consolidated, streamlined partner experience, the new portal has allowed Dropbox to realize cost savings and reduced time-to-market, and has laid the groundwork for smooth upgrades in the future.

“Upgrades are important because, in Liferay, you can build your solution in different ways,” said El-Nattar. “When we implement solutions, we ensure that anything being developed will have a clear path to upgrade based on what’s coming.” Rivet Logic’s years of experience have given them a familiarity with Liferay that allows them to advise their clients on the best way to find success with Liferay DXP.