ExtendSync for Outlook NetSuite is a powerful tool that enables your organization to have 360-degree visibility into important communications in the right place at the time.
In order for your Organization to be successful with ExtendSync, we encourage you to follow the best practices below.
This guide outlines best practices to maximize efficiency! ✨
Additional Tips
✅ Create an Internal Process
Create an internal process that is easy for users to follow and ensure they stick with it. Document this process and include it with their onboarding and reinforce it through subsequent trainings. Users should know what records to save emails too, along with what information should be in NetSuite (and how much). This will vary by Organization. It's easy for users to fall out of practice and miss getting important information into NetSuite. It's your responsibility to ensure this does not happen by monitoring and enforcing usage.
✅ Understanding Autopilot vs. One-Time Save
ExtendSync offers two ways to sync emails with NetSuite:
One-Time Save: Manually attaches a single email to a NetSuite record. Best for occasional or one-off emails.
Autopilot (Enterprise): Automatically syncs entire email threads or emails from a specific sender. Ideal for ongoing conversations.
Email Address based Autopilot (To/From/CC) functionality is limited to the primary folder and the sent folder in your Outlook.
Method | Best For | How it Works |
One-Time Save | Saving a single email to a specific record | Manually attach an email to a NetSuite record |
Thread-Based Autopilot | Conversations related to a single transaction | Automatically syncs all replies in the same email thread |
Email Address-Based Autopilot | Ongoing correspondence with a contact, customer or any entity records | Attaches all emails from a specific email address to a designated NetSuite record |
✨ Email address-based Autopilot is by far the easiest and quickest method to get your emails into NetSuite! Dig deeper on the different save methods here.
✅ Attach Emails to the right records
Extendsync users can attach emails to transaction records as well as entity records. If your organization has a long sales cycle and works off NetSuite Opportunities you may want to attach emails (and events) to Opportunity records. If you're working on shorter sales cycles you may want to attach emails at the Contact level.
🚨 HOT TIP:
To maintain data integrity, attach emails to transaction-level records (e.g., Sales Orders, Invoices, Support Cases) instead of the general Customer/Company record.
✅ Do: Attach emails to a Sales Order or Support Case to keep conversations contextual.
🚫 Don’t: Attach all emails to a Customer record, as it can clutter the timeline.
We typically advise against attaching emails at the Customer/Company level. Emails attached to a child record by ExtendSync will automatically roll up to their parent level (learn more about email rollup here).
Best practice - save to the child and it will roll up to the parent for you automatically.
This gives you the best of both worlds. You can see the email activity where it is most relatable yet you can also see it in one holistic view at the parent level.
✅ Measure accountability and drive adoption
Spend a few minutes per week to monitor usage right down to the individual user. Leverage the power of NetSuite to see emails and events by sender/recipient, entity, and more. If it isn't in NetSuite, it didn't happen.
NetSuite saved searches can be used to determine the number of emails attached to NetSuite.
We have created this article to help you build your dashboard to track usage over time and even have these metrics emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis. If usage is declining for a particular user or users, you can forward them the email and hold them accountable. If you need help setting this up just email cloudextend-support@celigo.com.
✅ Find and view emails in NetSuite with ease
There are multiple ways to access important emails in NetSuite, including:
View History (Record Level)
Dashboard View > Timeline
Customer 360
View History (Record Level)
View emails directly within the record’s communication subtab for Customers, Leads, or Prospects. This provides a detailed history of interactions at an individual record level.
All communication will always be saved under the messages tab. You can customize the default view (or create a new one) and add Message in the results so that you see some of the message content from the messages tab, versus having to click each email and open it up to see the content.
Dashboard View > Timeline
Get a unified view of all interactions, including emails, activities, and transactions, for a given Customer, Lead, or Prospect.
To add go to any Customer, Lead, or Prospect then click View Dashboard then add Timeline.
Customer 360
360-degree view of the customer, including their financial information, transaction history, and other related data.
Learn more about this feature here.
✅ Using OneDrive/Sharepoint (Enterprise users only)
Attaching OneDrive and/or Sharepoint files and folders to NetSuite records is beneficial because those associations do not consume any NetSuite storage space and it keeps everything in NetSuite, your source of truth and information.
We recommend using folders when possible because once you link a folder to a record or records in NetSuite, and files and folders are added via OneDrive or Sharepoint, they will roll back to whatever records they are linked to in NetSuite.
🚨 HOT TIP: Learn how you can Bulk upload your OneDrive for Business files and folders to NetSuite.
Additional Tips
✅ Exclude inactive NetSuite records when searching for records
Learn how to exclude inactive records from your search.
In NetSuite, Navigate to Set preferences > Analytics > Make sure the Include in-actives in global and quick search is unchecked.
✅ Search by Prefix feature in CloudExtend Bundle
The Enable Search by Prefix changes the way the bundle global search is performed.
When searching for a customer with the search phrase “3M” the global search will use “3M” as the search term. When this feature is enabled this changes to “cus:3M”.
The feature should be enabled by customers who meet the following criteria:
Customers having a large number of records that match a particular search term which can cause timeouts or too much data being returned in the add-in.
👉 Learn more about it here.
✅ Let your users know where to get help when they need it
ExtendSync offers a number of ways to get help:
Share this Getting Started link with end-users along with this guide on recommended customizations each user should make to the app
Keep a copy of your first end-user training call and distribute that to new employees
Visit support.cloudextend.io and search for your answer
Use the chat at the bottom right of the help center or also from your application
Reach out to your Customer Success Manager
Check status.cloudextend.io for any known issues