Advanced Administration

When we first looked at administering StickyNotes there were some areas we didn’t cover. This was because, they really only make sense, after looking at the product itself. Since we covered the usage of StickyNotes in the last few videos, we can talk about some more advanced administration topics now. Let’s go to the StickyNotes configuration page. Remember, we get there by going to Setup, then Customization, and clicking on StickyNotes Setup. You may remember we glossed over this email capture field down here. We said we would come back to it later, well it’s later, so here we are. This field allows you to set an email address used to capture incoming notes. It allows people to reply to notes that were emailed to them. This is only really applicable if you have this, Send Email Notifications, checkbox checked. The way it works is that, when someone is listed in the to field, of a note, NetSuite sends them an email with the contents of the note when it is saved. The person can then use their email and reply directly to the note. You might use this if you have employees who are more likely to check email than NetSuite. For this to work, you can’t just pick any email address you want. You have to get it from another location in the system. To get the email address, we need to come over to Customization, then hover over Plug-ins, and click Manage Plug-ins. If we hold down the ctrl key, while we click, this will open in a new tab. Let’s take a look. To enable this, we have to first select this, StickyNote Email Capture checkbox, and save the record. Then we can copy this email address. This is also a link, so it may take a little bit of finesse, to get the entire address selected, without clicking on it, which will usually open your email software. Now that we’ve copied the email address, lets come back to the setup tab, and paste it in the, Email Capture Address field. Now all we need to do is save the changes, and we are all setup to use StickyNotes email capture. I’ll also go ahead and close this other tab to clean things up, since we already saved our changes there, and we don’t need to do anything else with it. In my experience, having notes emailed just pollutes what is usually an already overcrowding inbox, but your business may find this to be useful, and exactly what you’re looking for. If so, use it. If you’ve been administering NetSuite for any length of time, or if you were paying close attention during the install, then you may have already figured out, the data that StickyNotes stores, is stored using custom records. Let’s take a look at some of the more important ones that StickyNotes uses. First we’ll go to Customization, then Lists, Records, & Fields, and click on Record Types. We’ll click, leave, on this message, because in our case there were no changes that we didn’t save. We’re looking at all the custom records we have, but we can expand our filters, and select to only see those from bundle 49018. Now we see just the ones for StickyNotes. I’ll also collapse the filters region so we can see these in a single page. Let’s open, and take a look at the data, for a few of the more important custom records. We could look at how the record is structured by clicking on the name, but in this case I want us to look at the data that is stored in the record. This is important if you ever need to export, or backup, your notes data. We get to the data by clicking list. Let’s look at StickyNotes Note, StickyNotes Note Reply, StickyNotes Priority, and StickyNotes Record Type. I opened all of these in new tabs, which we will look at individually, by holding down the ctrl key while I clicked. The StickyNotes Note, contains all the actual data for our notes. This is the most important record for the bundle. We can see some of this data, and tell what it is, very easily, such as the Message field, which contains the text of the note. We can see the fields continue as we scroll over to the right. We can also see the records themselves continue as we scroll down. There is one record for each note, which is probably what you expected. We won’t go through all the fields in this video, because that would be tedious, and the video would take too long. We won’t even go through most of them for the records we opened. You should, on your own though, go through these, as well as the records we didn’t open. This is because as an administrator, you really should know your data. Let’s close this and go to the next tab, which is for Replies. This record type is very similar to the one we just looked at, and contains a single record for each note reply. We only have two of them in the system right now, so they both fit on the same page, but you are likely to see many more. To me, this is probably the second most important record since it contains the data for all of the note replies. We’ll come back to the notes priority list in a moment, but let’s skip over to the record type. This lists all the record types that StickyNotes are enabled for. If you wanted to manually enable them for a new type, this is where you would do it. More importantly, if you wanted to temporarily disable them for a record type, you would do that here too. We can disable notes for a record type by making it inactive. Let’s click edit for this Vendor record. When this comes up, we can click Inactive, then save it. Now, notes are inactive for the vendor record. When notes are inactive for a specific record type, existing notes will still appear in the board, however, they will not show up on the record. Let’s take a look at this behavior by opening the board. I’ll go ahead and choose not to show the tutorial again, since we went through it in an earlier video. And also click OK to the popup message, and click Close. Let’s deselect all but the Vendor record down here. We can see the vendor notes still show up on the board, which is important, because it means that we can get to them if we need to. Now let’s open this AL Systems vendor. On the vendor itself, there are no notes. This is what we did when we inactivated the record. Let’s close this, and click outside the note in our board, so it’s not in the foreground. When you want to reactivate the record, you can come back to the list to do so. We first need to check this box, to show inactives, so we can see the deactivated records. Now we can either uncheck the inactive checkbox here, or click edit, which is what I’ll do, and edit this. Let’s uncheck the inactive checkbox, and save this again. If we went back to a vendor, StickyNotes would appear once again. Inactivating records may not be something that you use often, but if you ever need to do it, you know how. Now we can close this tab, and come back to the StickyNotes Priority List. This controls the default names, and colors, for your notes. You cannot add more priorities, however you can change the existing ones. If we click edit to the low priority, we can change its color to something dull, like a medium gray, by typing #AAAAAA in the color box, then clicking save. This is different than changing this on a user level, because here, we are changing this for everyone who uses the system, not just ourselves. Let’s come over to our board, and refresh it to see the changes. If we uncheck High, and Normal, to let our low priority ones come to the top, we see this very dull gray color that is set for them. Now we can close these two tabs. Earlier we looked at attaching images, files and documents to notes. These are stored in the file cabinet, let’s take a look at exactly where. To get there we’ll hover over Documents, Files and click File Cabinet. Down here we see this StickyNotes Files folder. Clicking it brings up a list of all the files we have attached at one point or another. We can see the Pie Chart graphic we attached earlier, which also has a preview file listed below it. The file may seem as though it is named a little strangely though. These numbers on the left, are a representation of epoch time. In computer terms, this is the number of seconds, or milliseconds, since midnight, January 1st, 1970. You don’t need to worry about these, but they do perform one important function here. If we have a situation where we upload two files, to two different notes, with the same file name, this time stamp would mean that one file wouldn’t override the other. Without this, it becomes a real possibility. If you ever needed to backup the files that were attached to notes, you could do that here. Just make sure if you do this, that you grab this Internal ID, because that is needed to reattach files to the correct notes; or at least it makes it a lot easier. There aren’t really a lot of premade saved searches for StickyNotes, in fact there’s only one at the time of this recording. We can take a look at it by going to Lists, then Saved Searches, and clicking All Saved Searches. Here we see the only search this bundle installs, which is a folder access search. This would be the only search from this bundle, even if I used my filters. This search basically just looks for what users, have administrator access, to your system. I don’t actually find it all that useful. If we click New Saved Search, and scroll down a little when the page loads, we have several search types we can create for StickyNotes. We could, for example, create a search that let’s employees know, what notes were created in the last week. This search could be placed on their dashboard, to keep them up to date. There is also a search you can create to see what notes have been deleted. If you want more information about that specific search, please see Article 64282 in SuiteAnswers. You can look through these, and experiment with them on your own, but it is beyond what we will talk about here. I just want you to know they are there. The last thing I want to mention is that, this bundle is somewhat extensible, as is all add on software for NetSuite. While there are no official handles or hooks into it, you can still script against the records that are created with Notes. This also includes using workflows. All of that will be unsupported officially, however if you are, or have, a skilled programmer, it can still be written in such a way that it will be unlikely to break or have problems. Now you have a thorough understanding of the StickyNotes bundle, and can put it to use for your business.