SuiteWorld 2017 from the view of our Senior Software Engineer Peter!

I am used to conventions on this scale or larger, so didn't have quite the same experience as prior SuiteWorlders on coming to Las Vegas. Even so, NetSuite certainly put on a good show, and made good use of the convention space.

Great to see so many NetSuite employees around and the energy is always good at conventions like this.

Obviously the biggest question was "what about Oracle?" This was addressed directly in Jim McGeever's Executive Keynote and they painted an extremely rosy picture. The promise from Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, was "More, Better, Forever".

I am very much a developer - Software Engineer to the core! - so I was more interested in SuiteCloud Processors, Multi-Level Joins and SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) than some of the big presentation items like SuiteCommerce Standard (SCS) and SuitePeople. That said, I think SCS is a great idea and will really help drive adoption of SCA - get a site quickly implemented on SCS then upsell to SCA when the client out-grows it or just needs a more custom experience.

SuiteCloud Processors will be amazingly useful; I know most of the clients I work with don't use SuiteCloud Plus and those that do probably don't use those extra script queues very effectively - there is a lot of manual manitenance required to keep all queues humming along nicely. With the current plan (forward-looking statements are subject to change, of course) being for all clients to have at least two SuiteCloud Processors, every client will benefit from this.

My only concern at this point is task dependency - when task A must absolutely complete before task B starts, which currently you can control by assigning them to the same queue; a control which automatically balancing SuiteCloud Processors will remove, unless a means of defining task dependency is also implemented.

NetSuite is really flourishing now, and using that to push on harder and make the suite even better - significant platform changes and improvements, workflow enhancements, search and analytics richness and performance, SuitePeople, manufacturing, SuiteCommerce and much more.

Oracle investment and resources will help with more global data centres, more local development teams to focus on really good, deep product localisation and the freedom to continue to develop the suite in the way NetSuite wishes to.

Several of the demonstrations featured new UI elements - charting and story board in Analytics, loads of areas in SuitePeople and some simple improvements to weekly time recording, stock movements via an interactive global map and more. It will be interesting to see these appear over the next few versions, and discover how much is available to SuiteScript- will we be able to create custom screens just as rich?

SDF continues to mature and grow and I believe every SDN partner should be using it. Likewise SuiteScript 2.0 - you will have to use it to access the growing number of new APIs so get on and start using it now! Yes it is going to hurt a bit to migrate legacy 1.0 code across, especially if you have become addicted to YieldScript, but NetSuite are now positioning SuiteScript 1.0 as "Technical Debt" - and like most debt, clearing it sooner is better than just letting it sit and grown. Incidentally, SS1.0 is not going away any time soon, but expect NetSuite to rescrict the ability to creat new SS1.0 scripts at some point (thinking in terms of years).

NetSuite 2017.1 has only just rolled out - and already I want to see all the cool stuff I expect to be in 17.2 and 18.1!

By Peter Boniface, Senior Software Engineer, Nolan Business Solutions Plc