Solve360 Discussion Forums

New feature: Merge Duplicates

Oct 21, 2009 10:28am Steve Ireland Administrator 286 posts	Today we added a handy utility that will resolve duplicate contacts and companies. The Workspace > Contacts > Merge duplicates option is available to the administrator user account. The feature will update the oldest record with the field values and category tags from the new record and then delete the newest record. Activities will not be merged. Although you can undelete the deleted records the merging of data is irreversible. Image Attachments Click thumbnail to see full-size image

Oct 21, 2009 02:27pm bdesilva Lyncean 261 posts	Hi Steve, what do you mean by “activities will not be merged?“ If both have activities will one simply lose the activities from the new record?

Oct 21, 2009 02:42pm Steve Ireland Administrator 286 posts	Yes, correct. Currently the feature copies field data and categories settings from the newest record onto the oldest record (newest value wins), then removes the newest record. All activities saved on the oldest record remain and any activities on the new record follow the deleted contact. At some point we might resolve activities too, but for now, here’s the first throw.

Oct 27, 2009 09:56am DowntownBoulder Enthusiast 12 posts	Works Great! Thank you Steve and co!

Dec 21, 2011 01:42pm andrewbenkard Apprentice 7 posts	Hypothetical: I import a bunch of contacts via CSV. BillyBob Briggs appears in contact record A and contact record B. Assume the first and last names are exact matches. So this is a duplicate. I go to merge. Which will take priority in the merge, record A or B? What if there is unique data in A, and unique data in B? What if the unique data are in the same fields (e.g. Business Email)? What if the unique data are in different fields? Thanks Andrew

Dec 21, 2011 01:52pm Engineering SpecialOps Administrator 3951 posts	When A and B were created is important. The feature copies field data from the newest contact onto the oldest contact (newest value wins if there is a conflict), then removes the newest record. Any field data on the oldest contact stays if there is no value on the newest contact record. Activities and category tags from the newest contact are merged to the oldest contact record.

Dec 21, 2011 02:01pm andrewbenkard Apprentice 7 posts	Records A and B were part of the same import. So I suppose if you are tracking creation time down to the millisecond, A would be newer than B and thus get priority. True?

Dec 21, 2011 02:42pm Engineering SpecialOps Administrator 3951 posts	Yep… but if you’re importing all new ideally would be better to resolve the duplicates before they came in.

Dec 21, 2011 06:12pm richski New Member 2 posts	How do you determine “duplicate”? I have two contacts with the same name but are unique people?

Dec 21, 2011 06:16pm Engineering SpecialOps Administrator 3951 posts	It currently matches by name (same for company). An option is to distinguish records by adding something to last name “John Doe (Norada)“ or company e.g. “Norada (Europe)“. If a computer can’t tell the difference quite often people will miss it too. We are working on a dynamic conflict detection feature which will also use email. Hopefully we’ll have more to share on that soon.