Melissa Schulte
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 5th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Summary: Melissa gives us a taste of the new duplicate detection functionality within Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan”.
Overview
Duplicate checking has always been a highly requested utility that Microsoft CRM v3.0 did not have. I have done few implementations where the client does not ask how CRM handles duplicates entered into the system, and unfortunately I have to say “out-of-the-box, it doesn’t”. Sure there are a number of ways that we’ve been able to extend CRM v3.0 to prevent duplicate data from being entered into a client’s CRM system, however these options have either required extensive custom development or the purchase and configuration of a 3rd party product.
With the new Titan (CRM 4.0) release, you will be able to, out-of-the-box (with a few minor configurations), detect duplicates records as they are entered into the system – even during data import!
Below are some further details about Titan’s duplicate detection functionality.
Duplicate Detection Rule Requirements
· Duplicate Detection must be enabled
· At least one rule must exist for the entity being checked
There are four system-wide default scenarios that you can choose from once you’ve enabled duplicate detection:
- On record create or update – users will be automatically prompted before saving or importing potential duplicate records
- When Outlook client goes from offline to online – each person using the Outlook client must set how they want dup detection to work when they synchronize data (by default, duplicates are not checked during synch)
- During data import – Each time a user defines an import, the choice of whether to check for duplicates is available
- By a workflow action
**NOTE: when and how much dup detection should be a decision based on performance tradeoffs since dup checking takes system resources
Considerations When Configuring Rules
- Default Rules are only created for Accounts, Contacts, and Leads
- Case Sensitivity
- Record types can be checked against different record types
ü While creating/updating a record of the Base Record Type, it is checked against the match codes of all existing Matching Entity records.
ü Can have > 1 rule for each record type
- Rules must be published – a match code is created for every record in the matching record type for the rule
Process to Configure Rules
1. Navigate to Settings à Data Management
2. Double-click on “Manage Duplicate Detection Rules”
3. Click New to create a new rule, or double-click on an existing rule
Examples
Here are some ways that Titan’s Duplicate Detection can be configured:
· Lead first name, last name and phone number against all existing contacts
· Check a partial account name against all existing accounts
· Custom “Project” entity can be checked against all existing opportunity based on a custom project attribute, such as “Project ID”
Melissa Schulte, is a Microsoft CRM developer at Crowe Chizek (www.crowecrm.com). Melissa currently focuses on System Implementations on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 platform.
