What is a Portlet in NetSuite?
Before we talk about NetSuite custom portlets, let’s define a portlet. A portlet is essentially a visual plug-in that you can add and arrange on your NetSuite dashboard to highlight certain information. It gives you a snapshot of your business, and the portlet options allow you to tailor your view. The Personalize Dashboard panel displays the content that you can add to your dashboard on tabs for Standard Content, Custom Portlet, Report Snapshots, and Trend Graphs. The portlets that you are currently using appear on the Currently Used tab.
What is a Custom Portlet?
Sometimes, out of the box functionality and numerous standard and custom KPI’s in NetSuite are not enough. Frequently, there is a need to source external company information and feed it directly to NetSuite’s Dashboard or perhaps create custom functionality that NetSuite does not offer out-of-the-box.
In order to bridge this gap, NetSuite gives us ‘Custom Portlets’. Custom Portlets are custom SuiteScript, wherein scripts that can be deployed directly on NetSuite’s Dashboard.
There are 4 different types of custom portlet scripts:
- List: A list of user-defined column headers and rows. (i.e.: custom Saved Search result portlet)
- Form: A basic data entry form which when submitted can create/modify records in NetSuite,
- HTML: An HTML-based portlet, the most flexible presentation format used to display free-form HTML (images, Flash, custom HTML).
- Links: This default portlet consists of rows of simple formatted content (for example an RSS portlet). Any XML type of feeds could be configured via the Links portlet.
Examples of a Custom Portlet
The following are the examples of custom portlets created by Plative which have helped to increase the efficiency of customers in their day to day activities. These were developed to pull together many different NetSuite reports and searches into one place.
1. Marketing Reporting
- This custom Portlet captures the progress of marketing campaigns created in NetSuite.
- It also captures the cost incurred in different types of marketing categories which helps the marketing team to keep an eye on marketing budget
- It also shows various other indicators through which the marketing team can determine which campaign is more effective.
2. Sales Rep Follow up Metrics
- This portlet captures the progress of lead to prospect and prospect to customer conversion.
- It also captures average lead time for customer conversion
- It captures the revenue generated from each sales rep.
- This portlet helps the operations team to keep track of the sales reps and the revenue generated from each sales rep.
