Duplicate Management (Closed Beta)

Maintaining clean and accurate data is one of the most important things you can do to help your organization get the most out of Salesforce, so we’re excited to introduce Data.com Duplicate Management. Now you can control whether and when you allow users to create duplicate records inside Salesforce; customize the logic that’s used to identify duplicates; and create reports on the duplicates you do allow users to save.

Available in: Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

Note

Due to extremely high demand for participation in the Data.com Duplicate Management Closed Beta program, we have reached our capacity and are not taking new nominations. Please understand that Data.com Duplicate Management is scheduled to be generally available to all our CRM customers with Professional Edition and higher in the Spring ’15 release (Safe Harbor applies). Based on the current release schedule, this means the feature will be available in production organizations by mid-February, 2015, and mid-January, 2015, for sandbox organizations.
This release contains a beta version of Data.com Duplicate Management that is production quality but has known limitations. You can provide feedback and suggestions on the Salesforce Success Community. For information on enabling this feature for your organization, contact Salesforce.

After Duplicate Management is set up, any time a user attempts to save either a new record or an existing record, the duplicate management tools go to work. First, the record is compared with existing Salesforce records to identify possible duplicates (1). The criteria used to compare records and identify the possible duplicates are defined by a matching rule. Next, a list of possible duplicates is returned (2).

What happens when the record being saved is identified as a possible duplicate depends on what’s defined in the duplicate rule (3). For example, the duplicate rule could block users from saving the possible duplicate record or allow them to save it anyway. Both the Block and Allow options include an alert, which tells users why they can’t save the record and what they need to do. The Allow option includes the ability to report on the duplicate records.

Duplicate Management Beta Limitations

Duplicate management is only available for accounts, contacts, and leads. All other objects, including custom objects and Person Accounts, are not currently supported.
Matching rules do not work across objects. For example, a matching rule won’t compare Contact records to Lead records.
Duplicate rules run as described here for records created from their respective tabs and edited directly from the respective record detail page (either by clicking Edit or editing the record inline). Any other method of creating or editing records (including but not limited to Lead Convert, creating record from the Chatter publisher, and adding records to Salesforce using data import tools) will always result in the save being blocked, regardless of the action specified in the duplicate rule, and the user will not see a list of possible duplicates.
Duplicate rules don’t run when records are created using Quick Create.
If your organization doesn’t have the “Use Apex Lead Convert” permission, duplicate rules don’t run when leads are converted to accounts or contacts.
Duplicate rules created for leads do not compare converted leads; therefore, converted leads will never be returned as possible duplicates for leads.
When a person account is converted to a business account (and the newly created business account matches existing business accounts), duplicate rules will always block the save, regardless of the action specified in the duplicate rule.
You cannot manually merge records if there’s an active duplicate rule that specifies the action on edit as either Allow or Block.
The customizable alert text in duplicate rules isn’t supported by the Translation Workbench.
If your organization uses Data.com and the Data.com duplicate preference option is set to allow duplicate records to be added from Data.com Prospector, duplicate rules will run but always block users from adding the new records, regardless of the action specified in the duplicate rule.
When a record is restored with the Undelete button, duplicate rules do not run.
For matching rules to work in a sandbox organization, you must deactivate all matching rules (and any associated duplicate rules) and then activate them again. Doing so allows the match index to be created.
Standard and custom matching rules that use fuzzy matching methods only support Latin characters.
If you’re using international data, we recommend you use the Exact matching method with your matching rules.

For more information about Data.com Duplicate Management, including detailed information about matching rules, see the implementation guide.