Easy straight forward approach to managing contacts is to make Contacts a direct child of Company.

But many times ONE person/contact will be involved with multiple Companies.

So I'm looking for some tips how to set up a oneContact to ManyCompany solution.

I have made a "join" table to connect Contact to Many Companies.

But this makes for an awkward contact creation experience for the user.

i.e.

User is viewing CompanyCogs record and does NOT see Dexter in the related Contacts list/portal.

So User runs a "New Contact" script.

But Dexter ALREADY exist, just has not been tied to CoCogs.

So now system has TWO Dexters.

Any tips or example of this done well?

Thanks!

IDEA:

In the "Create New Contact" script I will have a pop-up window asking User to type in new contact's name.

User then clicks "Add Contact" button to resume script.

Script will then search database for any loose matches on the entered contact name.

If any loose matches are found, pop-up will display possible matches.

Script will then give User the option to use an existing contact or continue creating a new contact.

Hopefully this will catch duplicates before they happen.

Any thoughts? :P

That's the exact process we follow. Send them thru a Find first.

However, you'll still end up with duplicates. We've added a "consolidate" feature to merge duplicates.

bcooney, your "consolidate" feature has my interest. Do you mind explaining it a bit?

Thank you for the feedback!

Basically, it is an interface to allow admins to merge duplicate records. User selects a "Master" and a "Candidate". Each shows its children in portals below (such things as addresses, activity records -- anything to help the user determine that these truly are the same people). Then a Merge button reassigns all the Candidate's children to the Master, and logs the Candidate in a PeopleArchive table (who was merged with who).

Included in the interface are portals of people that match the Master's email, first initial last name to select a Candidate.

Cool, an admin tool. I will explore this, sounds like a good thing to have in the solution!