The mother of all duplicate merging questions (and some other issues)

[emagadmin]

I have the following problem:

All of my staff have imported thier Outlook contacts into Sugar 5.0.0d on Windows using the Outlook connector for 2007 and for each Contact an Account was created. If there were 25 contacts from the same company then 25 Accounts were created with the same account information. First of all, this is a pain that the connector does this vs. performing a lookup like with Leads to determine if a duplicate record already exists, but I digress!

So now I have a ton of duplicate records for each of my sales staff and using the Merge Duplicates functionality from within the GUI is slow and impractical for my needs. Is there a way to achive what I need by performing an export and then an import, or something of the sort? I don't want to have my team spend their sales time reworking their accounts and this is an admin nightmare. There has to be a faster way.

Another note... I have workflows set up to send me an e-mail whenever one of my staff creates or modifies a record for an account, lead, contact, opportunity, task, etc. When these events occur using the Sugar GUI the workflow fires just fine. When these things occur in Outlook and are then synced, then the workflow does not fire and I am unable to track the activity. Any ideas?

[emagadmin]

Anyone? Help please.

[roblaus]

Hi,

I suggest to export your records and use a tool like fuzzy dupe or similar. From within Sugar it will take too long. I just hope that you didn't relate any other records to your duplicates because then it's really hard work.

But please be careful - as I hear (and feel...) the import routine isn't yet 100% bug free. What means you really must do this on a test instance first. Or at least back up your DB twice before you start.

With 4.x it would have been a lot easier because there post and email addresses are kept in one table (separate for accounts and contacts). Now they are in separate tables and unfortunately email addresses are usually your first identifier.

The simplest (but less precise) way is to export your accounts through phpmyadmin as csv. Open them with Excel or similar and sort the rows by name and street. Delete the ones you do not need and re-import. After that run an operation on your related records where you delete (set deleted = 1) all records where the related id cannot be found in the accounts table.

have fun...
rgds
rl