What is NetSuite Sandbox and Why is it Important?

Think of your NetSuite platform as a plane for an instant. 

 

It’s a powerful ecosystem of controls and functionalities built within a massive foundation, geared towards handling high velocities of operations at a time. Meanwhile, your business is the only and most important passenger. If you wanted to, say, do some work on the wing or engine or controls of your plane, would you do it mid-air during flight? Would you have your passenger on board, while you experiment to upgrade and adjust your massive vehicle?

 

Now, let’s apply that same concept to your NetSuite system. Your ERP is huge – it’s the vehicle that carries your business financials, your operations, and your company’s day to day activities. As your business continues to grow, similarly to how you would handle a plane, your team will need to perform customizations, new integrations and play around with a multitude of new features (NetSuite automatically updates twice a year with all kinds of great new functionalities – learn more about that here) – all to ensure that your have the strongest, most functional ERP system for your expanding company requirements and growth objectives.

You don’t want to make changes while your plane is in the air, and you just as surely don’t want to risk affecting your ERP’s current functions while it’s running your entire back-office. That’s why you take matters into a virtual maintenance room (aka Sandbox), a risk-free environment that simulates your actual NetSuite. This is where your team can play around with new features, configure customizations, test out updates, and so much more to improve your ERP use. Once you’ve safely tested everything in this virtual space, you can then apply it to your ERP without wondering if you might have accidentally broken something.

You can learn more about NetSuite Sandbox and even ask for an assessment to see where it fits into your business through our product page here.

What are the Different Sandbox Accounts and Which Are for Me?

  • Sandbox Account

    A sandbox account will provide a replica structure of all the customizations, configurations and data that you see in your live production account (you can arrange this by date of last update), but will not affect your real-time operations. 

  • Development Account

    A development account will include the features and SuiteApps that you have set-up in your production account – without having any of the data or customizations displayed. For the sake of building new functionalities for your specific needs, you can populate this virtual space with any data you need so that the team working on your project can develop and test new features. If you are collaborating with an external NetSuite partner, they will not be able to see your data.

  • Premium Sandbox

    Standard sandbox accounts are designed primarily for end-to-end testing and assume a lower traffic level than normal production accounts. For customers with high performance needs or large volumes of data, NetSuite offers premium sandbox accounts. Premium sandboxes more closely simulate the behavior of production accounts in order to support high-volume automated performance testing. As with a standard sandbox, the premium offering replicates your organization’s configuration, customization and data. Premium sandbox customer data can be refreshed at any time.

What is the purpose of the different Sandbox Accounts?

  • Development Account

    Used for custom-building SuiteFlows, basic SuiteScripts and testing new features. You can use this account to collaborate on projects with an external NetSuite partner.

  • Sandbox

    This is a single sandbox account – geared for customers and consultants to work on specific customizations with SuiteFlow and SuiteScript.

  • Multiple Sandboxes 

    This is meant for bigger projects with a litany of complexities – where your NetSuite consultants are going to be developing large SuiteScipt applications at the same time. You want to have several sandboxes to build new functionalities simultaneously. 

Looking to find out which accounts you need? Talk to a NetSuite professional.

 

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About Athen Bozoglu

Having caught the writing bug at an early age, Athen has been working with different companies in leveraging the freshest content for over a decade. He comes from a copywriting background. In the past, he has worked on copy for B2C and B2B clients across Montreal and Canada for retail, construction, manufacturing, education, and restaurants. He studied Communications and English literature at Concordia and developed a loving relationship with media the minute he laid hands on his first DSLR camera. 

Today, he consults with a team of technical experts to hone in on the latest industry trends and bring you powerful blogs on Oracle NetSuite, the Cloud, and technology.

In speaking with a great number of experts and clients across most major industries, the approach and questions remain the same: How can I optimize my business to bring in more money? What are the technologies that are right for my company? How can I improve my financials and better manage growth? 

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