Overview
Calendar Autopilot automatically syncs your Outlook calendar events to NetSuite in real time, eliminating the need for manual associations or re-syncs.
Once enabled, all updates, deletions, attendee changes, and agenda edits made in Outlook are reflected automatically in NetSuite, ensuring your schedule stays consistent across both systems.
At the same time, users retain the flexibility to manually associate events with other records (like transactions or support cases) when needed.
This article explains how Calendar Autopilot works, how manual sync behaves when it’s enabled, and how CloudExtend prevents duplicate entries in NetSuite.
🔄 Calendar Autopilot at a Glance
📆 Automatically syncs Outlook events to NetSuite in real time.
🧩 Associates meetings with the correct NetSuite entities (Contact, Customer, etc.).
⚙️ Reflects updates and attendee changes instantly.
🕹️ Lets users manually associate events to other records if needed.
🔐 Includes safeguards to prevent duplicate NetSuite calendar entries.
Outlook Event Sync Behavior
When an Outlook event includes attendees, ExtendSync automatically searches NetSuite to find and associate the event with the right entity records.
Sync Priority Order
Events are linked in this order of preference:
Employee > Contact > Customer > Vendor > Lead> Prospect > Partner > Job
Once the first matching record is found, ExtendSync also identifies the associated company record and automatically links the event there as well.
Example:
Suppose you schedule an Outlook meeting and invite John Smith (john@acme.com) as an attendee.
What happens next:
ExtendSync searches NetSuite for a matching record in the following order:
Employee → Contact → Customer → Vendor → Lead → Prospect → Partner → JobIt finds John Smith as a Contact.
ExtendSync identifies that John Smith is associated with Acme Corporation (Customer record).
The event is automatically logged under both:
Contact record: John Smith
Customer record: Acme Corporation
🔄 This ensures that meetings are automatically associated with the right entities.
💡 Note:
Go to your Outlook Calendar and open the event from there. Calendar sync works in Edit Mode and Read Mode of Event.
Calendar sync is disabled in Compose mode when Event AP is enabled as we would not get the event details while the user is composing the event.
Manual Calendar Sync (When Autopilot Is Enabled)
Even with Calendar Autopilot enabled, users can still manually save events in NetSuite, this flexibility is a huge time-saver.
Previously, manually associating an event (already synced by Autopilot) could create duplicate entries in NetSuite.
To fix this, CloudExtend introduced improvements to identify whether an event was synced manually or by Autopilot.
To prevent the duplicate event creation, we came up with the solution below!
How Duplicate Prevention Works
Maintain the Attendee list in NetSuite for Each Event
The CloudExtend Attendees tab in NetSuite now stores:
Attendee emails
Associated entity records
The user who synced it (via “Synced By” field)
Any manually added associations
External ID Enchancement
The External ID has been updated to exclude user-specific details, allowing ExtendSync to uniquely identify events and prevent duplicate creation during manual sync.
💡 Note:
External Ids are backend identifiers used by ExtendSync when emails or events sync to NetSuite
Show Associated Records in the Add-in
The ExtendSync add-in now displays all associated attendees and records linked to an event.
You’ll also see a warning in the Subscription Portal when enabling Event Autopilot if your organization needs to manually associate events.
Users should ensure they’re using the latest version of the ExtendSync app (February 2024 or newer).
Older versions may still cause duplicate entries.
🔒 Preventing Duplicates
When Calendar Autopilot is enabled, we took the precaution of disabling the manual associating feature in Compose mode to prevent duplicate entries in the NetSuite calendar.
To manually associate the event simply open it after saving.
If manual association were allowed in Compose Mode, the event would sync twice, once during sending and again during Autopilot’s background sync.
🔵 Manually Saving Events to Entities
If a user tries to associate an event to any entity record, that record will be added as an attendee and a duplicate will not be created.
If a user tries to associate it with a Contact, the Contact field in Related Records will be updated along with the Company.
🔵 Manually Saving Events to Transactions
If a user tries to associate an event to one transaction, the transaction and company field in Related records would be updated.
If a user tries to associate an event to more than one transaction, duplicates would be created as NetSuite itself does not allow more than one entry in the transaction field.
🔵 Manually Saving Events to Support Cases
If a user tries to associate an event with 1 support case, the support case field and company in Related records would be updated.
If a user tries to associate an event to more than one support case, duplicates would be created as NetSuite itself doesn’t allow more than one entry in the transaction field.
💡 Note:
If a user links an event to more than one contact, transaction, or support case, duplicates will appear in NetSuite.
A future update will eliminate this issue by merging updates to the same event record instead of creating new ones.
Shared Association Feature
Associations to NetSuite records when done by you or another ExtendSync user within the organization will be showing in the application as well. The purple indication means someone associated the event with NetSuite so no need to do any linking.
If both users, A and B are invited to an event, and B manually links the event to a record in NetSuite, when A views the event in Outlook it will show a purple indication to signify that the event has an existing association.
If A and B were invited to an event, and the event was synced via Event Autopilot, when either A or B logs into the application and checks the event in Outlook, users would see the AP icon on the associated records.