Netsuite Sandbox is an account or an environment that essentially copies the current company production database to a different or separate server. The account options can be purchased from NetSuite.
Companies with a NetSuite account are expected to pay an extra fee to have access to the sandbox account, where snapshots of the companies’ current database are taken and copied to a test server within days or a week depending on the demands. This enables the companies to test out the incremental modification to the existing set up and give them a chance to see if the set up conflicts with other customization.
Once purchased, the NetSuite sandbox has to be refreshed with the request of ‘refresh’ from the administrator, thus creating a copy of the production database in the same time. During the process of refresh request, one can select only to allow the administrator access to the sandbox account or allow all other users to have the access. Any workflows triggering an email notification to the recipients is prefixed with the [sandbox] disclaimer, therefore allowing all parties to differentiate notifications sent from the production account.
Typically, NetSuite gives you limited number of refresh options and have to pay for extra. This is a very great option to the NetSuite customers wishing to develop and test; their own system customization, JavaScript Mods using Suite Script, Workflows using Suite Flow or any other portion in their NetSuite system. Most of the clients use the sandbox account to provide new hires or employees with the training option without affecting the production system.
The NetSuite sandbox account is highly enhanced to provide control and more visibility to the account administrators, and now the clients can manage the copies of the data in the sandbox account as soon as it becomes available and still request a refresh from the same page without going through the NetSuite support. In addition, the clients can view the turnaround time estimates for the NetSuite sandbox as well as monitoring the refreshing progress down to the remaining hours.
This makes the planning tasks much easier for the administrators and IT staff and can now effectively manage the project timelines. In some cases, the refresh process automation helps to cut down the time taken in the refresh up to a half. The addition of the refresh summary information in the page, enhances more visibility in the number of refreshes used and the remainder, refresh progress and status, the last person to request a refresh, and time the production snapshots were taken and more. All this information is usually available for each sandbox account when multiple of the sandboxes are used. The functionality addresses the upmarket complaints and eases the pain on Release Engineering.
Currently, more than 20, 000 midsize and high growth companies and large enterprise divisions use the NetSuite sandbox to run their production system effectively, avoiding the high cost and inefficiencies of on-premise systems. The process automates operations, streamlines processes, and enables real-time business information access anywhere, making growing businesses and firms to realize the breakthrough performance improvements.
As with most quality services , the NetSuite sandbox account is not cheap, but such an amount of customization in the production system is usually worth it.
