At Convergence 2014, the tipsters participated in some “Ask the MVP” sessions. There were many great questions, and I wanted to highlight a few of them.

One question was asked about preventing duplicates in CRM 2013. As you may know, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 no longer includes the duplicate detection dialog on the form that notifies users when they create a duplicate record. Knowing this, some Microsoft customers assume that duplicate detection does not work in CRM 2013, so they don’t publish their duplicate detection rules after upgrading to CRM 2013. However, this is not the case.

Duplicate detection still runs when records are created in the platform via data import or Outlook tracking. These can be major sources of duplicate records, such as when users track contacts from Outlook, CRM automatically creates contacts from tracked emails, or a user imports a list of contacts from a trade show. While having duplicate detection rules published will not make the duplicate detection dialog pop up on the form, it will prevent duplicates from being created by alternate creation methods.

Bonus tip: want to bring back the form level duplicate detection dialog? Use MVP Jason Lattimer’s (not the world champion of magic) excellent CRM 2013 Duplicate Detection solution. It works just like the 2011 duplicate detection dialog, but has one significant improvement–you can prevent users from saving the record if a duplicate is detected.