This post is part of a three part series on duplicate management in salesforce.com. See our blog for the other two posts which contain additional detail.
The situation. You have people, sometimes employees, sometimes partners, sometimes customers, and they’re all entering information. It’s almost inevitable, people entering creating records will create duplicates.
There are solutions for this, discussed in greater detail in the remainder of this series, with the benefits and drawbacks to using each of them.
If you just want the answer and aren’t looking for the specifics:
We recommend training users to look for records before creating them, and letting the duplicates happen while reporting on the potential duplicates after the fact. Merging them later is easy and your data loader and other connected or integrated applications will operate as expected.