This article is relevant if you are a NetSuite administrator and you are seeking to clean up contact records.
Background
One of our clients was having trouble with updating NeSuite contact records that were marked Private. The client was unable to edit the Contact. When they tried, NetSuite offered a warning that you can’t edit records that are private. When they tried to edit the Private field, it effectively was disabled (we tried using script and received the same error messages).
It turns out that the field was marked Private a while back when the client was using NetSuite’s Outlook Integration. Microsoft Outlook has a Private field function that was synchronized with NetSuite. The private field value can only be changed by the owner of the record. The owner of the record is one that created the contact.
How to Update NetSuite Contacts Marked Private
Here is what we had to do to solve this issue:
- Identify the record owner. In our case, it was one employee that was no longer with the company.
- We exported all the contacts to CSV file that were marked private with the Contact internalid.
- We then reactivated the employee record and temporarily gave system access as Administrator.
- We logged back into NetSuite as the reactivated employee (as an Administrator) and then performed a CSV import of the file we just exported.
- On the CSV import map, we set the field “Is Private” to No.
- We imported all the records which marked “Is Private” to No.
