Duplicate Contacts

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Posted on by RBLACK75

Hi There,

I have a few users that are getting duplicate contacts created in Outlook and I am struggling to find a reason why this is happening. The duplicate contacts are both showing as tracked and have a crmlinkstate of 2 but only one of them updates when you make a changes in CRM (as expected). however this makes it hard to detect the duplicate with testing first.

The duplicate seemed to be created first thing on the Monday morning, after the account was created previously,on the Friday afternoon. You would think that once they had created the account the contact would sync to Outlook so why was a duplicate created on the monday?

For example:

First contact created in Outlook on Friday afternoon (the account was created at this time in CRM and had multiple updates and associated entries added, hence synced to outlook)	20/06/14 @ 13:47
Audit history shows the last thing the user was working on was updating a the client account (updated address ) and stopped making changes at 14:46 on Friday afternoon.	20/06/14 @ 14:46
Second contact created in Outlook first thing on Monday Morning	23/06/2014 @ 08:50

User has CRM 2011 with update rollup 17 installed

Any help appreciated

Richard

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CRMInnovation.com on at

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Are the owners of the duplicated records the same?

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Community Member on at

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Hello Richard:

What fields do you have set for your duplications for contacts or accounts, you might need to add more fields and Criteria's

Most important are your Duplication Detection Rules Published.

_damon

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Bruno Lucas 5,421 on at

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My client had the same issue.

I fixed by enabling duplication detection:

(this is an official Microsoft page recommending to use duplication detection when using contact tracking with crm outlook)

www.microsoft.com/.../track-outlook-contacts-in-crm-for-outlook.aspx

that is a good idea when the users have to go though so many emails and end up forgeting and tracking someone that is already there.

But it can be also caused by upgrading a workstation

check this out:

http://thinketg.com/preventing-duplicate-contacts-in-dynamics-crm-and-outlook/

Before you upgrade workstations or uninstall Outlook, follow these steps in your original Outlook client:

Open the Personal Options settings screen for the CRM plugin

On the Synchronization tab, click Outlook Filters

Select all the filters, and click Deactivate

Synchronize with CRM, and all synchronized Outlook records will disappear

Set up your new Outlook installation, install the CRM plugin

Follow steps 1-4 again, but confirm the filters are Activated

Now, Outlook is synchronized with CRM with all your expected records, and there will not be duplicates

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Community Member on at

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There is a known issue in CRM 2013 of creating duplicates when hitting the "Save and Close" button from any form. I am not sure if it is there on CRM 2011.

It was fixed in Update Rollup 3 on CRM 2013.

support.microsoft.com/.../2930480

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RBLACK75 on at

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The contacts are only duplicated in Outlook and there is only one contact in CRM as expected. We have duplicate detection rules switched on within CRM.

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RBLACK75 on at

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We have duplicate detection rules enabled in CRM and the duplicate are only showing in the end users Outlook. I don't think the duplicate detection rule will help with duplicates in Outlook?

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RBLACK75 on at

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Thank Bruno, that looks like a great way to clean up the duplicates. What I really want to do at the moment is try and understand how these are being created so I can advise the end users on how to prevent them in the first place. I will probably use your method to help clear up some users with multiple duplicates.

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Community Member on at

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Hi Richard,

Could it be that the end users have synced CRM with Outlook multiple times? I've known this to happen in the past. This blog post online gives a good summary and may help you identify the cause thinketg.com/preventing-duplicate-contacts-in-dynamics-crm-and-outlook

Hope that helps,

Aaron

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RBLACK75 on at

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Hi Aaron, in this example i checked the dates for the last install of CRM and when it was last updated. The duplicate were created about a month after it was last updated. So unfortunately i don't think in this case its due to re-install or upgrade of the CRM client.

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