Duplicate Check for Salesforce Review
When it comes to data keeping systems in business, one of the biggest problems often encountered is the creation of duplicate records, tables, and other data unit concepts. Checking for these duplicates is a long and tiresome task when done manually, and keeping track of which ones are duplicates or originals is nigh impossible. Fortunately, CRM software offers solutions to this problem, Duplicate Check for Salesforce being an example.
Now, the thing is, most complex, flexible CRM solutions offer built in duplicate check and management features that don’t call for an additional solution like Duplicate Check for Salesforce. Is this the case here, and regardless, does the solution work?
Well, first of all, it does indeed work as advertised, and it does bring in some mild additional functionality such as mass report checking and the like, and it does reduce an otherwise tedious action (if done manually) into something that takes minimal effort.
However, I don’t honestly think this thing is entirely necessary, because to be frank, Slaesforce can already do most of this on its own. Yes, checking for duplicate report types, controls and some other additional objects isn’t that easy to implement, but to be serious for a moment, duplicates of those things don’t happen that often unless you’re being particularly careless or disorganized.
We’ve in fact covered how to do this in tutorials in the past, and it’s no more complicated through standard Salesforce automaton than it is with this extension. The problem is, people just don’t know that functionality is already there.
Now, there may come a situation where, due to severe technical glitches or a lot of bad mistakes, that you need the automation of checking for higher level groups, which Salesforce doesn’t natively do itself. In the event that this happens, then you’ll need something like this to make it faster.
Another reason you might need this additional extension is to make it easier for trainees and other new users of Salesforce to find the anti-duplication functionality.
In situations like that, then yeah, this thing could be handy, and it really does work. It’s no more or less complicated than doing this in Salesforce natively, I just really can’t see this being something that everyone needs, due to most of it already existing.
I would be willing to go out on a limb and bet that most of the mechanics behind this extension are subclassed manipulation of existing duplicate checking for half of it.
I know it sounds like I’m coming down hard on this one, because as a design, there’s nothing wrong with it. But, this is a case of the wheel being reinvented, and that was bound to happen in the App Exchange sooner or later.
Just as such, I was bound to give a Salesforce app review, sooner or later, that was less than enthusiastic. I guess Duplicate Check for Salesforce has the dubious honor of being the first review in this little series of mine that didn’t get my thumbs up fairly one hundred percent. It works, it does what it says, but unless you really screw up in using Salesforce, its native duplicate elimination functionality is all you’re really going to need.