Enhance Data Integrity with New Duplicate Management Feature
With the Salesforce.com Spring 15 release Salesforce.com can now enhance your data integrity using Duplicate Management.
Follow the quick steps below to implement matching and duplicate rules. Be sure to consider your own data and processes to determine how to best set up rules to enhance your data integrity without frustrating your end users. If you need help, please contact your Buan consultant.
Define matching rules
To navigate to the new Duplicate Management section, go to Setup>Administer>Data.Com Administration>Duplicate Management:
First, define your matching rules. This is where you will tell the system which fields to compare and how to evaluate each field when determining whether or not a new record is a duplicate of an existing record.
Salesforce provides you with standard matching rules for Accounts, Contacts, & Leads. However, you will need to activate these matching rules if you wish to use them.
If the standard rules do not meet your business requirements, you can create your own custom matching rules.
Creating custom matching rules
To create a custom Matching Rule:
1. Click on Matching Rules and then on the “New Rule” button
2. Choose the Salesforce Object to which the new rule will apply and click “Next”
3. Define your Rule Details – This is where you are telling the system which fields to use and whether to look for an exact match for the data within that field or use Salesforce’s Fuzzy Logic
4. If you want to set any of your fields to be evaluated using OR logic, you must “Add Filter Logic”
5. Click “Save”
6. Before you will be able to use your newly created Matching Rule, you must “Activate” it
Creating duplicate rules
Now that you have a matching rule, you will need to create the Duplicate Rule that will determine when to apply the matching rule and how the system should handle duplicate records when they are identified.
To create a Duplicate Rule:
1. Click on Duplicate Rules and then on the “New Rule” button and select the object to which the duplicate rule will apply
2. Record-Level Security: Specify the Rule Details and how the system should handle evaluating records within your security model
3. Actions: Specify how you want the system to respond when it finds a record that meets the matching rule criteria
a. If you Block records from being created when the system has identified an existing match, your users will be prevented from creating the record and will be presented with a link to the existing record (if the user has access to the existing record based on your security model/sharing rules)
b. If you Allow duplicate records to be created, you can choose to have those records present the user with an alert and/or to make the duplicate records reportable
4. Choose the object you wish to evaluate the records against
5. Choose one of the Standard or any of your custom Matching Rules that will be applied with the duplicate rule
6. Specify any conditions that you would like records to meet before being evaluated by the Duplicate Rule – A good use case for this is if you only want to evaluate specific record types or if you have different duplicate rules for each record type
7. Click “Save”
It may be in your best interest to define multiple duplicate rules with different matching rule criteria on the same object (Example, you may want to create a duplicate rule that uses a rigid Account matching rule that blocks the creation of duplicates and another duplicate rule that uses a looser matching rule that only reports on records that meet it for evaluation by an administrator). When you have multiple duplicate rules on the same object, you can specify the order in which they run.
Testing your user experience
Now that you have created your own duplicate rules, you can test out the user experience by attempting to create duplicate records. When you create a record that meets a duplicate rule that blocks its creation, you will see an error message similar to this:
To report on records that met a duplicate rule but were allowed/reported, you must create a Custom Report Type and a report to see the data.
Congratulations on taking steps toward cleaner data!
Important Limitations (AKA the fine print):
- Duplicate management is only available for accounts, contacts, leads, and custom objects. All other standard objects, including Opportunities and Person Accounts, are not currently supported.
- Duplicate rules do NOT run when records are created in following ways.
- When records are created using Quick Create
- When leads are converted to accounts or contacts and your organization doesn’t have the “Use Apex Lead Convert” permission
- When a record is restored with the Undelete button
- When records are added using Exchange Sync
- When records are manually merged
In some cases, if duplicate rules are set for an alert to show when potential duplicates are found, users will always be blocked from saving records and will not see a list of possible duplicates. Examples of this include the following.
- When records are added using the data import tools
- When a person account is converted to a business account (and the newly created business account matches existing business accounts)
- When records are added or edited using Salesforce APIs (example, through a data integration process using a third party application or web service)
You can read more information in Salesforce Help & Training or contact your Buan Consultant for any questions you might have at 410-263-2707.