Help, Support, and SuiteAnswers

Help, Support, and SuiteAnswers are three excellent resources if you get stuck in NetSuite, and best of all, they’re free. In this video we’ll take a look at these resources. Let’s start by looking at help. Help can be accessed from almost anywhere in NetSuite by clicking this help button here in the upper right, and it will always open in a new page. Help is context sensitive, which means that what you are doing when you click it matters. For example, if we click it on the home screen we are placed at the root of the full index and can drill down or search for what we need. I’ll go ahead and close this. If you click on help from somewhere else in the system, while entering a transaction for example, you are taken to information about that subject. Let’s go ahead and start to enter a sales order by hovering over Transactions, then Sales, then clicking Enter Sales Orders. Clicking help from here, we are taken directly to a document about entering a sales order. This is extremely useful if you are right in the middle of doing something but need help. Since this is still the same categorized index we can also traverse up and down the tree like structure. So, if we needed information about a subject that was similar to, but not exactly, what we clicked on, there’s a good chance of being able to find it this way. For example, we can see the topic for approving sales orders down here, but at the same level in the tree as the one for entering sales orders. It’s also probably obvious, but the plus and minus signs next to the topics, indicate that there are subtopics, clicking on them expands or collapses the parent topic. If we didn’t find the needed information based on where we were when clicking help, we could use the search up here to search for it. So maybe I realized that I was really looking for information about addresses, I could search for that here, and there are quite a few results. It doesn’t matter where you are in help when you search, you will get the same results. There is no need to navigate to the top, or down a level or two. This help screen also has a menu that has a few links, but they don’t go quite the same places you might expect. For example, if we click on the home icon we go the help center home screen. This screen provides some more information about using help. There are also links to SuiteAnswers which we will cover in a moment, as well as links to NetSuite’s sponsored training resources, SuiteApps, User Guides, and New Release information. Back in NetSuite, we see this Support link in our menu bar, here on the right. If we hover over support, there is an overview listed as our only option. Clicking the menu and clicking overview go to the same location, this support dashboard. The reason this is a menu is that if you have internal support procedures, your administrator can customize this to have more options. In my case there aren’t any other options, but you may have some that are specific to your organization. The support dashboard gives us access to the NetSuite Account Center where we can manage support requests that are sent to NetSuite. You will need the support center role to view this, and typically there are only a few people in an organization who communicate with NetSuite directly. This centralization helps prevent changes being made in one area that cause problems in another. You can go to the NetSuite User Group, which is a forum where you can exchange ideas about the system and get support from other users. This is a great place to learn about problems others have faced, and how they have solved them. You can also follow NetSuite with these links down here. Lastly you can get to SuiteAnswers from here, let’s take a look. There is actually a pretty good video tutorial about how to use SuiteAnswers that can be used as supplemental to this if you want. The most common way to navigate SuiteAnswers is the search, up here. If I search for Purchase Order, I get about fifteen hundred results. We can see the results broken down into categories on the left hand side. These categories are mostly self-explanatory. There are some training videos that NetSuite provides, and some are very good, some not quite as good, but the technical knowledge is there. Help Topics are the same articles that are in the help section, but they are provided here for convenience. If I click on this first result, which is a help topic, the path to the article in the structured help is provided. I also see some summary information about the article, including the Date it was published, and date it was updated. This Answer ID is helpful if you want to refer someone else to the article, including NetSuite’s tech support, because you can search for this in the search box and will get the correct article. If we go back to the SuiteAnswers home screen, by clicking on the home link here in the upper left, we have a few more things to look at. We have an Announcements section, which are NetSuite’s tech support communications to their customers. There is information about what is trending in the help center, and other useful information toward the bottom. On the right there is information about how to get in touch with NetSuite about urgent problems. Generally, it should be the system administrators, for your companies’ NetSuite instance, that make this call though. There is also a link to NetSuite’s phone routing menu, which is useful to have ahead of time, so you can get to the correct support resource quickly. We have the ability to login to the release preview account, which is an account you can use to test new release functionality prior to it being rolled out to you. On the right hand side there are also links to additional training resources including Videos that NetSuite provides, a link to the training catalog, and a list of Webinars and Events. So, next time you get stuck in NetSuite, take a look through some of these resources, and see if they can’t get you where you need to be. Questions this video will answer: • 0:05 – What are some other resources when I get stuck in NetSuite? • 0:15 – How do I get to NetSuite help? • 0:20 – Why doesn’t clicking help take me to all help? • 0:40 – How can I find help about a specific subject? • 1:15 – How do I navigate NetSuite help? • 1:25 – How do I search NetSuite help? • 1:50 – Why do NetSuite help menus take me to different places? • 2:15 – How do I get to the support dashboard? • 2:30 – Why don’t I see the NetSuite Account Center? • 2:50 – How do I get to the NetSuite user group? • 2:50 – What is the NetSuite user group for? • 3:00 – How do I get to SuiteAnswers? • 3:10 – How do I navigate through SuiteAnswers? • 3:25 – Where do I find NetSuite training videos? • 3:35 – What are SuiteAnswer Help Topics? • 3:40 – How do I find where a SuiteAnswer is located in Help? • 3:45 – How do I tell when a NetSuite help topic was written? • 3:50 – What is a SuiteAnswer ID, and what is it used for? • 4:05 – How do I get back to SuiteAnswers start screen? • 4:10 – What are Suite Answers Announcements? • 4:20 – How do I call NetSuite tech support? • 4:30 – How do I find NetSuite tech support phone menu? • 4:35 – How do I login to my NetSuite Release Preview Account? • 4:45 – Where can I find more NetSuite training resources? • 4:45 – Where can I find NetSuite’s training catalog?