Partners

Every company you have a trust relationship with gets a shared workspace under Partners, in the Network & Access part of the sidebar. Both companies see the same workspace. It holds who to contact on each side, and the requests between you, so questions don't get lost in email.

Who is a partner

• A company becomes a partner as soon as either of you approves the other's trust request: you can open its full profile, it can open yours, or both. Requesting and approving trust is explained in Sharing with other companies.
• The Partners list shows each company with the direction of trust (Mutual trust, You see their profile or They see your profile), the date you became partners, requests waiting on you and the last activity.
• A yellow counter on Partners in the sidebar shows how many requests are waiting on your organization, across all partners.

The workspace

Select a company in the list to open its workspace. It has three tabs:

• Overview: trust in each direction, the version of their published trust profile, requests waiting on you, and the contacts they've named.
• Contacts: who to go to on each side, by topic.
• Requests: every request between your two companies, in both directions.

Select Open full trust profile at the top to see their declarations and evidence. It appears when they've approved your trust request and your role lets you open partners' full profiles.

Naming your contacts

Each company names its own go-to person for six topics: Commercial, Technical, Security, Legal & privacy, Billing and Incident escalation, the person to call first about a breach or outage.

1. Open the partner's workspace and select the Contacts tab.
2. In the Your side column, choose a member of your team for each topic, or Not set.
3. Select Save your contacts.

• You can change only your own side. The other column shows what the partner chose.
• Contacts are picked from your team, so the partner always sees their current name, job title, email and phone number. When someone is removed from the team, their topics show Not set until you choose someone else.
• You can name different people for different partners.

Sending a request

1. Open the partner's workspace, select the Requests tab, then New request.
2. Enter a subject, for example "Please share your updated penetration test summary", and describe what you need. Add a due date if there is one.
3. Select Send to followed by the company's name. The request gets a number such as PRQ-7K2Q9XWM that both companies can quote.

The partner sees everything you write in a request, so keep internal remarks out of it.

Answering and following up

A request's status shows whose turn it is:

• Waiting on you: the partner asked you something.
• Answered · your turn: the partner answered a request you sent. Reply if you need more, or close it.
• Waiting on the partner: you've sent the request or your reply, and they need to answer.
• Closed: it's dealt with.

Open a request to read the conversation and:

• Reply. Your reply hands the request back to the other company.
• Assign it, when the partner sent it to you: choose who on your team handles it under Handled by. The partner sees who is handling it.
• Close it once it's dealt with. Either company can close a request and either can reopen it later. A closed request takes no replies until it's reopened.

Requests past their due date show the date in red, marked overdue.

When trust ends

• If both directions of trust end (revoked or ended under Incoming or Outgoing Requests), the company stays in your Partners list as Trust ended while its workspace holds contacts or requests. You can still read everything, but nothing can be changed.
• If BordersHub suspends the partner's account, the workspace is read-only until the suspension is lifted. See Account suspension.
• When trust is approved again, the workspace can be used again, with its history intact.

Who can use Partners

• Admin, Governance, Sales, InfoSec and Risk can name contacts, send, answer, assign and close requests.
• Auditor and Read-only can view the workspaces but not change them.
• Contributor and Approver don't see Partners.

Changes to contacts and requests are recorded in your Audit Log, under the Partners category.