Dedupe rules are cool, and works well for Individuals, primarily because you have multiple fields to combine.
When it comes to organisations it is more difficult. We focus on individuals but want to register the organisations they work for, so in the profile we use for most on-line registrations (events, subscriptions, ...) we ask for organisation name.
This often leads to multiple organisation records with almost the same name. Typical name variations are
- Somecompany Inc.
- Somecompany International
- Somecompany
Dedupe rules are of limited help here since the best I can do AFAIK is the length of the match.
In Sweden a very common pattern is
- Ericsson
- Ericsson AB
I would be extremely happy if there was a way to match the full length except for the last three characters... Or if the match was true if the shorter is a true substring of the longer. Documentation is kind of flakey here, it doesn't say anything about what happens when fields are of different lengths.
Another alternative would be to match to either to the organisation name or the legal name. This would handle most of the above cases and allow me to use the names as (I suppose) they where ment to be used, causal name vs. official/legal/full name.
Actually I have a hard time figuring out how to make the best use the 'length' part of dedupe rules. (I'm a regex guy, so I'm longing for a LIKE-like option, is there one?)
Any suggestions?
