There are several Outlook utilities available on the market
today which help you to eliminate your duplicate Outlook contacts. When
evaluating these applications, how do you know which one to choose?
We've put together a list of some features which you should look for
in making your decision. These are key capabilities which will make a
difference in the usefulness of the tool for you.
1.
The utility should let YOU define what is considered a duplicate contact.
When analyzing your Outlook contacts and deciding which ones
are duplicates, contact de-dupe utilities look at certain fields of
information to make decisions about whether two contacts are duplicates or
not.
Some utilities evaluate a fixed set of fields and do not let
you control which fields are used in making this decision. This provides
little or no flexibility, and does not allow you to accomodate different
scenarios that you may be faced with at different times.
Look for a
utility that lets YOU choose what fields it should evaluate when it makes
decisions about what is a duplicate. For example, you may have one set of
contacts where you want to consider Last Name and First Name in deciding
what is a duplicate. In another set of contacts, you might want to consider
Last Name, First Name and Company Name. In still another scenario, you might
want to consider e-mail address.
A good utility will present you with
a list of field options, allowing you to choose the set of fields to include
in its duplicate analysis.
Even better is a utility that lets you
completely define the field set that is considered. Perhaps you have a
custom "Customer Number" field that you want to evaluate to determine what
is a duplicate. The most flexible and desirable de-dupe utilities will allow
you to use even your own custom fields in deciding what is a duplicate
contact.
2. The utility should have the ability to
merge information at the field,
not the record, level.
In Outlook terms, a record is an Outlook contact. A field is a
piece of information within that contact; for example, Last Name, Job Title,
or Business Telephone Number.
When faced with a set of duplicate
contact records and making a choice as to which one to keep, some utilities
will always keep all of the information - the fields - from that one
contact, discarding all information (fields) from the other duplicates. This
is an extremely limited capability. Rather, you want a utility that will
selectively merge individual information fields from different duplicates.
Further, you want a utility that will display all of the fields from
all of the duplicates to you, and allow you the option to select which
fields you want to keep from which record. For example, you may want to keep
the Company Name and Job Title from one duplicate, but keep the Home
Telephone Numbr from another duplicate. Your utility should give you the
ability to make these field-level choices, and to see the results on-screen.
3. The utility should be able to run automatically, so
that you don't have to manually handle each set of duplicates.
When removing duplicates from a set of Outlook contacts, you may be
faced with dozens or even hundreds of duplicate contact records. In such a case, you do not want to have to step through every duplicate and
process each, one-by-one.
Rather, you want a tool that gives you the
option of automatically processing the entire set of contacts. This
capability can save you literally dozens of hours over time, especially when faced with large
sets of duplicate contacts.
4. The utility should
allow you to process contacts across multiple folders.
While the most common scenario is to analyze and remove duplicates from
contacts within one Outook Contacts folder, you may encounter times when you
want to de-dupe multiple folders.
For example, you may
have your main Contacts folder, but may import some Contacts into
another folder from an exteral source. The best contact duplicate
elimination utilities will allow you to eliminate and merge contact records
across both of these folders.
5. The utility should
provide you with total safety by backing up your contacts before making
changes to them.
Contact de-duplication utilities are
working with your valuable contact information! As with all software
processes that modify your data, it's critical to have a safety net in
place.
So, be sure you select a tool that gives you the option of backing
up your contact information before altering it. In this way, you can always
revert back to the state of your data as it existed prior to running the
de-duplication process.
