Consider the following before using the Duplicate Contact Manager and Contact Sweeper:

•Contacts that are updated or added through the actions of wizards, rules, and custom views are not automatically checked for duplicates. If you wish to prevent potential duplicates that result from these actions, you must modify your wizards, rules, and views. For wizards and custom views, one option is to add the Potential Duplicates block to your wizard or view. Also, the ContactSerivce.readDuplicateContacts API method is available for use in your custom code. This method allows you to check for duplicates before committing a contact record. See Using Rules for more information.

•Review the design of wizards, rules, and custom objects to verify that the criteria for identifying duplicate contacts is narrow enough not to prevent users from completing wizards successfully. You may need to modify existing rules and wizards to handle duplicate exceptions wherever a contact is created or updated.

•After you use the Contact Sweeper to remove existing duplicate contact records from TeamConnect, you should determine which contact fields should be required to create a contact and for day-to-day duplicate contact checking. For example, a person contact might require the First Name, Last Name, and Phone Number fields. This standard could be enforced by creating validation rules. Company contacts might require the Company Name, Phone Number, Street Address, and Postal Code fields.

The contact fields you set as Active from the Duplicate Contact Manager settings screen determine which contact fields require unique data when users create or update contact records (when duplicate contact checking is enabled).

Note: You may select one or more contact fields to use for search criteria.

The Duplicate Contact Manager settings screen determine which contact fields are used to find potential duplicate contact records.

In the following steps, you can:

•Select whether to enable day-to-day duplicate contact checking (and whether to enable a user override to allow creation of duplicate contact records)

•Select which contact fields to activate for comparison of a new contact's field data against existing contacts' data

•Select logic for combining multiple contact fields as duplicate record identifiers

Duplicate Matching Settings

Using AND/OR Logic

If AND logic or OR logic is selected, when a user is creating/updating contacts, the duplicate check only evaluates field criteria that apply to the type of contact being created/updated.

For example, suppose duplicate contact checking is enabled for First Name, Last Name/Company Name, and Social Security/Tax ID using AND logic. If a user creates a company contact, duplicate contact checking performs a comparison against existing company records using the Company Name and Tax ID fields (ignoring the First Name criteria).

If custom logic is enabled, for example, "(First Name, Last Name/Company Name, and Social Security Number/Tax ID) or (Default Postal Code and Phone Number)," when creating/updating a company contact, only "(Last Name/Company Name and Social Security Number/Tax ID) or (Default Postal Code and Phone Number)" is checked.

Creating Contacts in the Search for Contacts Pop-up Window

When users create contacts from a Search for Contacts pop-up window, duplicate contact checking only compares certain fields to existing contact records (for example, when an Involved record is added to a project).

For example, when a user creates a contact from the add person button, the following fields' values are compared to existing contacts: First Name, Last Name/Company Name, Title, ID, SSN/Tax ID, default Street Address, default City, default State, default Country, default Postal Code, and default Category field.

For another example, when a user creates a company contact from the add company button, the following fields' values are compared to existing contacts: Last Name/Company Name, SSN/Tax ID, default Street Address, default City, default State, default Country, default Postal Code, and default Category field.