Outlook Company Information Missing from NetSuite 2.0 Sync

Lost Company Information Situation

In my post (Synching Contacts in NetSuite’s Outlook 2.0), I discussed the NetSuite  2.0 Outlook Sync beta.  One challenge we are working through is missing / lost Company information.  Here is my assessment of the situation:

1. NetSuite’s Outlook 2.0 pushes up Contacts to NetSuite that you marked as shared within Outlook.  As it does this, it does not populate the NetSuite Company field.
2. NetSuite Companies are really Leads / Prospects / Customers depending on their status.
3. It appears up to you to create the NetSuite Company record so it can be attached to the contact record.  The Outlook Sync function does not appear to do this built-in.
4. Once the contact has been synced to NetSuite, it is effectively orphaned without a company record.  It basically looks like a contact without a company from NetSuite’s perspective.
5. Eventually, the Outlook Sync system will drop the company information in Outlook.  It appears to do this through multiple sync events back to Outlook.  In my assessment, this is not desirable at all.  I believe a better design is to never remove Outlook information.
6. The Outlook Sync system modifies your Outlook contacts form to show you the linked Company record.  However, this does not account that there are other Outlook clients accessing information including handhelds such as the BlackBerry.

I had two conversations with NetSuite about this and they recognize this as a problem.  I understand their design philosophy but this doesn’t work well in practice.

Workaround

We are in the process of designing a workaround.  We are effectively uploading Company records manually through the CSV import function.  The trick here is to use the mechanism that will automatically attach contact records to those companies;  NetSuite almost gets you there.  You can upload both your company and contact records with simply the following information to get these Contacts to attach to Companies:

1. NetSuite Company –> Outlook Company Name
2. Primary Contact –> Outlook File As

This works reasonably well.  But it is not enough.  We are caught now with this situation:

1. The first contact to get attached is marked as the primary contact role for that company.
2. No other contacts at that company will get attached.  You will get a “A customer record with this ID already exists.” message.
3. While contacts do attach to the company in a parent – child relationship, the information in the contacts Company name still field do not get matched; it stays blank.  This field is ultimately what we need to get populated to get company information back to Outlook.

At this point, we are still not satisfied.  What is next?  Looks like we need to do some programming:

1. Create company names in NetSuite. 
2. Find all contacts that have the same company email domain and attach them to the company in the parent – child relationship.
3. Once the parent – child relationship is established, modify the company field on the contact record to contain a reference to the Parent.

Outlook Sync 2.0 should then get the Company information back in the native Outlook Company field.  We’ll update the post once we have some progress.

Update

We resolved this issue as discussed in the Updates to Missing Company information within NetSuite Outlook 2.0  post.

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Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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