New DemandTools Enhancements to Help with Your Salesforce Data Health

Have you ever searched for a contact in Salesforce only to return a dozen or more Contacts and Leads with the same name and the same Account in your search results? What did you do after you saw those contacts?

Data duplication can cause a lot of problems when trying to run your Salesforce or CRM operations efficiently. Common issues are inaccurate numbers on reports, exceeding data storage limits and most importantly it can turn users away from using the system because they don’t trust the data.

System administrators spend a lot of time cleaning up data manually in Excel and import them back into the system with Salesforce DataLoader. While it may sound simplistic it involves more than deletion of duplicate data. Often admins have to reassign related objects from the duplicate data to the master record. Yes, it is very challenging and isn’t fun without a tool that can do it all.

DemandTools from CRMFusion is probably the best tool available to handle all of these issues. DemandTools is available on the Salesforce AppExchange and allows admins to cleanse duplicates in any type of object in Salesforce. Besides data cleansing it is also used for data maintenance, discovery and verification. It also includes a nifty data update tool that can mass transfer records to the new owners.

We use DemandTools at OpFocus and so do a lot of our customers so we thought we would share some of our favorite new features in their recent update:

MassImpact Enhancements

MassImpact allows admins to select a set of records in Salesforce and apply changes uniformly across the entire set without the need for importing or exporting data. This functionality allows admins to develop and maintain data standards by developing corrective actions (scenarios) to common data mistakes. Recent enhancements we liked:

• Conditional Object Counts: With the “Limit by where condition” we can count records using the condition with any field in the sub-object or use “Field Sum” to sum number or currency field in the selected sub-object and use that number to update a custom field in the selected object.
• NEW TrimSpaces Formulas: I remember trying to do VLOOKUP to match Account Names in Excel and they looked exactly the same but the formula returned #N/A. Later I found out that the source data had end spaces (a lot of spaces), which I couldn’t see. I’m glad that DemandTools has added this feature to the new version, so I can trim all invisible leading and trailing spaces before I do a VLOOKUP.
• ProperCaseName Formula Enhancements
• ONLY attempts to proper case when the input data is all in upper or lower case – No more funny looking account names. All the names with improper format will be taken care of.
• Improved logic to better identify abbreviations when there is no punctuation between the letters (based on a word having no vowels)
• NEW ProperCaseOverrides.txt file available in DemandToolsDataReplaceList directory for user customization

MassEffect Changes

MassEffect is a fully international character compatible data loading tool for Salesforce that allows one to import, export, update and delete Salesforce and Force.com platform data. There's one cool, new enhancement to MassEffect

• Export UNLIMITED records to .csv: An unlimited number of records can now be exported to a csv file without any memory errors (Yes!).

Single Table Deduplicator Enhancements

As the name suggests Single Table Deduplicator is the industry standard for batch deduplication for Salesforce. It can find and merge data in any Salesforce objects including custom objects. The tool provides great flexibility in terms of how dupes are identified with multiple methods available for merging records. Single Table Dedupe just made some nifty Master Rule enhancements:

• The Master Rule "Most Opportunities and Contacts" now runs 100+ times faster than before allowing one to process large sets of duplicate groups faster than before.
• The tool can also display the calculated Opportunity, Contact and Active Contract counts AFTER a master rule is applied. As an example it is helpful to see which Account really has the most Opportunities in Salesforce.

Visit the DemandTools site if you are interested in learning more about the latest release. CRM Fusion also has some other great tools to help you manage data such as PeopleImport and DupeBlocker and worthy of your attention.

What tools are you using to manage duplicates or maintain database health at your company? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Meet the OpFocus Team at Dreamforce 2011 This Summer

That's right! The OpFocus team will be at Dreamforce to soak in all the information that Salesforce.com has to offer and meet with old and new friends alike. If you are a customer, a friend or a fan of OpFocus, please let us know if you will be attending Dreamforce. We would love to see you there!