Pages

Monday, January 18, 2016

Salesforce: Duplicate Management

More than a year ago, I blogged about using DupeCatcher as duplicate management tool in Salesforce. DupeCatcher was a good tool, but with many new enhancements around Salesforce recently, such as: Salesforce1, Salesforce for Outlook, and Salesforce themselves build something similar as out of the box feature called Duplicate Management (under Data.com setup menu). Also, recent poll in Success - Premier Central, standard Duplicate Management has been used by 45% of community.

After play sometimes with Duplicate Management, I foresee this tool able to replace aging DupeCatcher which has been not updated for quite sometimes. What I like from standard Duplicate Management compare with DupeCatcher:
  1. Work well with Salesforce1 app
  2. Work with Salesforce for Outlook
  3. Better duplicate reporting
  4. Respect duplicate management rules for mass data load

To setup Duplicate Management, navigate to SetupData.com AdministrationDuplicate Management.

1. Matching Rules
Matching rule compares field values to determine whether a record is similar enough to existing records to be considered a duplicate. For example, a matching rule can specify that if the Email and Phone values of two records match exactly, the records might be duplicates.

Matching rules would be the 1st step you need to setup to configure duplicate management, by default Salesforce provide 3 matching rules for Account, Contact and Lead, but they are inactive. In many cases, you need to create your own matching rules based on how your company / organization defined matching rules. See reference links below to understand standard matching rule for Account, Contact and Lead.

To create your own rules, from Matching Rules page click New button.
  • Step 1. select an object: Account, Contact, Lead or custom object
  • Step 2. enter rule name, description, select fields to compare as matching criteria, you also can add filter logic if it is not always AND. Depend on the selected field type, matching method can be Exact or Fuzzy.
  • Step 3. activate the rule, once the rule activated, you will get email that the matching rule has been activated and ready to use.


2. Duplicate Rules
Duplicate rules work together with matching rules to prevent users from creating duplicate records. A matching rule determines whether the record a user is creating or updating is similar enough to other records to be considered a duplicate, whereas a duplicate rule tells Salesforce what action to take when duplicates are identified. For example, a duplicate rule can block users from saving records that have been identified as possible duplicates, or simply alert users that they may be creating a duplicate, but allow them to save the record anyway.

To create duplicate rules, from Duplicate Rules page click New Rule button and select the same object of Matching Rule created earlier, for this blog I'll be using Account. Next page, you need to specify:
  • Rule Name and Description
  • Select "Record-Level Security", I'll select "Bypass sharing rules" for this blog, this mean matching rule will compare to the whole database regardless user accessibility
  • Action on Create and Edit: allow or block
  • Alert Text
  • Select matching rule created
  • Optionally you can add conditions

Once duplicate rule created, you need to activate it.


When duplicate rule is activated and user enter duplicate data, since we allow user to create or edit with alert, user will get option to Cancel or Save (Ignore Alert), it also shown existing record consider as duplicate with the one user trying to create or edit.


By default, it will show fields used in the matching rules, at this moment we are not able to configure it. Thanks to Francis Pindar for his workaround to have fake matching rule to display fields as needed.


Duplicate Record Reports
As I said earlier, we can report on duplicate record easily, you need to create custom report type by each object (Account, Contact and Lead, or  All Duplicates), read this document Create Custom Report Types for Duplicate Record Reports for the steps.


Reference:


No comments:

Post a Comment

Page-level ad