Finding Bundles

In the previous video we covered what a bundle is. In this video we’ll search for and find a bundle to install, using the search and install bundles feature. Before we do that though, let’s take a moment to talk about permissions. To search for and install bundles you have to use a role that has the SuiteBundler permission. Without that permission, you won’t be able to get to the Search & Install Bundles screen: so you won’t be able to do the install. Technically speaking, this is the only permission you need, but it’s a best practice to use an Administrator role. A lot of bundles run a configuration script during the install. That script might be run with elevated permissions, or it might be run with the credentials you used when installing the bundle, it depends on how the developer wrote it. If it runs with your credentials, and you don’t have permission to do something, then neither will the script. This means that the bundle might not configure itself correctly to begin with. Of course, you could always go back and reinstall, but why not avoid it, if you can. Since I am already signed in with an administrator account, we won’t encounter any problems. Let’s search for a bundle. We’ll navigate from the home screen by hovering over Customization, SuiteBundles, Search & Install Bundles and clicking on List. We could have clicked directly on Search & Install Bundles, however navigating this way lets us look at what’s already installed. We can see there are several bundles already installed in this account. Below we can see some information about each installed bundle. We see the ID, version, management status, abstract, and more. We’ll cover what this information means a little later, but basically it’s all summary information showing the same thing we’ll see when we install a bundle. The installed bundles screen we see here, is powered by a saved search. This search cannot be edited easily, but we can sort the results by clicking on any of the columns at the top. If you had a lot of bundles installed, you might sort this list by the install date as a sort of change log. Of course, you can probably find other examples where sorting this list would be useful. If we click New we’re taken to the Search & Install Bundles page. We can type in the keywords field, and press enter, or click search to search for a bundle. We could also leave the keywords field blank and we see every bundle available; over ten thousand. Bundles are listed by the number of installs and we can’t really change this. While the sheer number of bundles may seem daunting, don’t get overwhelmed since any bundles with more than just a few installs will appear early in this list. Once you get past the twentieth page the number of installs drops to single digits. Because of this there really are not as many results to sort through as it would first seem. If you’re wondering why there are so many bundles with so few installs, there are a few main reasons. Sometimes students in a NetSuite’s training classes accidentally publish test bundles; or at least this is true for classes that cover bundles. Sometimes bundles are published accidentally as a test by a developer or consultant. Sometimes a bundle is meant for a small target audience and should only have a few installs. There are many other reasons as well, but it’s a pointless exercise to try and list them all here. Coming back to the search field, we can type the name of the bundle, its ID, or other keywords and filter our results. For example we could type “NetSuite Platform Solutions Group” then press enter or click search, now we see a much smaller results list. NetSuite Platform Solutions Group is the name that NetSuite’s SuiteLabs publishes under, and SuiteLabs is NetSuite’s experimental development department; it’s kind of like NetSuite’s version of Google Labs. There are far fewer results with this search than we saw earlier, and most of the bundles we will install in this course are listed here. There is also an advanced search link up here, but we’re going to cover that in a couple of videos from now. I’m going to go ahead and clear the search so that we see all the bundles again. Not all the bundles we see here are free, many require payment before they will work, or work properly anyway. This doesn’t mean you will get a bill from NetSuite, or a third party, asking for you to pay for what you just installed, or at least I have never heard of this happening. Different bundles accomplish licensing checks in different ways. Some bundles require a payment before you get an activation key to allow them to work. Other bundles use third party services and simply won’t connect to those services until they are paid for. Because of this, and for many other reasons covered in this chapter, you really shouldn’t install bundles you’re not familiar with. In addition to some bundles having their own terms of service, there is also a general terms of service that covers all bundles found here in the bundle repository. You can read the full text by clicking on this link, which will open in a new tab. Basically what this says is that bundles here are As Is, and NetSuite is not responsible if you mess up your instance of NetSuite by installing them. Since this document really is pretty short it’s probably worth taking a moment to read through on your own.