File Cabinet

In the previous video we looked at attaching documents to records using a couple of different techniques. In this video, we’ll explore where those documents reside once they are uploaded to the system. That starts here in the file cabinet. This is a continuation of the last video. If you need to catch up, we got here by going to Documents, Files and clicking File Cabinet. So, we have our contracts that we uploaded just a moment ago. We can preview or open these by clicking the document name. For PDF documents we get this nice browser preview, and this is because we are using Chrome. For Word documents we have to download and open them, but we can get to them without too much hassle. In addition to the file itself, whenever a file is uploaded, a file record is also created. We can get to that record by clicking edit. In this tab, we see the file record. We can see a lot of information about this file here. Some of the more important details we can see are located under the Notes subtab, then under System Notes. Here we can see everything that has gone on with this. In our case, all we did was upload it, so we only have this one entry. Had this file been replaced with a newer version, we would see that, or we could see other changes that had taken place. Let’s go ahead and close the record and go back to the file cabinet. Let’s come back up here to the Drag and Drop Files folder. If I click that, I can click Edit to either of these folders. I’ll right click and edit the Customers folder record in a new tab. We also have system notes for this folder, the same as we did for the file. This will tell us what has changed for the folder, though not what has changed inside the folder. Folders can have permissions applied to them. That is, they can be restricted to a specific Class, Department, Location, or Subsidiary; they can also be restricted by Group. Groups are kind of nice because they allow an administrator to manually control permissions when the need arises. Folders can be made private to a specific individual. We can also provide a description if we want to. Back at the file cabinet, I want to talk about some default folders that are included with most NetSuite instances. We can move up levels of the file cabinet by clicking this folder with an up arrow. Here at the top level, we see that each of our folders has an ID. Some are positive numbers, and some are negative. The negative numbers represent folders that were delivered with NetSuite, or through the use of an add-on. We have folders such as Attachments Received and Sent. If we were sending and receiving email using NetSuite, this is where the attachments would go. We have SuiteApps, Bundles, and Scripts, as well as Templates and Web Site Hosting Files folders. NetSuite uses these to store various bits of system information. This includes things like program code we write and add to our system, and website files and images. If we open suite bundles for example, we see the three bundles we have installed in our instance of NetSuite. Since this is an intro course, this is probably stuff you will never need to worry about, but you may want an idea of what is stored in the file cabinet anyway. We also have this search up here. We can use this to search the entire file cabinet, and it doesn’t matter where we are when we search. With this search we are always searching the entire cabinet. Let’s type Colorado and choose search, and we can see the three contracts we uploaded earlier. This search is only looking for titles. If we want to be a little more specific with our search, we can use this search link here. Perhaps we want to look for documents that are larger or smaller than a certain size; we could do that here. Maybe we want to search based on the date a document was created, we could also do that. There is an even more advanced search as well, but the use of that is beyond what we will cover here. I’ll go back a couple of times, so we are back to our file cabinet. There may come a time when we need to download a full set of folders and files, rather than downloading each file one at a time. Let’s go into our Drag and Drop folder. From here we could download all our customer files and folders that are located under this. Clicking Download, gives us a zip archive, and Chrome is helpfully saving this for me automatically. If I go ahead and open this, we can see all of our customer folders, which in this case are our customer IDs. I can click into 1906 and see the contracts from before. I can also go up a couple of levels, and see that this is actually a zip archive that’s in my downloads directory, along with several other documents. NetSuite does keep a log of everything that has been downloaded. Let’s navigate back to where our contracts were uploaded. Maybe we realize that we don’t need this first contract anymore. We can delete it by choosing delete files up here. It does matter what folder you are in when you click this. You will only see files that are in the same folder you are in. Let’s check the checkbox for the first contract and click delete. We get a popup dialog box, making sure we really do want to delete this. If we click OK, it’s deleted. Maybe we made a mistake, or need to add another document for some other reason, we can do so by clicking Add File. Here we simply choose the file from our operating system, click open, and it’s uploaded. You may have noticed this Show Inactives checkbox up here. We can inactivate a file, which hides it, but doesn’t delete it. If I choose to edit this first contract again, I can choose this inactive checkbox and click save. Now you will notice, we don’t see the first contract, however it is still here. If we check this Show Inactives checkbox, now we see it. If your admin has the file drag and drop bundle installed, then you most likely also have another view to the file cabinet. This can be accessed by going to Documents, then Drag and Drop Files, and clicking File Cabinet. This file cabinet has all the same data as what we were just looking at. It works almost identically as well, the only real difference is this, Drop files here, box. I can come out to the local computer, and grab our contract that we were working with earlier. I can now drag and drop this into the file cabinet. The folder I’m in when I do this, is where the document will be uploaded to. There is no way for the system to know that this isn’t really where this file belongs. It’s probably obvious by now that NetSuite is not a file system. It can however be used to store critical documentation. In fact, I think this is one of the best ways to use the system to make business operations simpler.