I'm not so sure it's a "problem". We think of it as a useful new feature to maintain new contacts easier than before. And as long as an old contact isn't referenced by a quote etc, can be merged into a new Shared Contact, although a manual process to be sure.
I don't see how Epicor could've done it any other way without producing a new way that couldn't integrate some of the old ones. And I wouldn't want a program to merge the old contacts as most of them haven't been maintained well, like misspellings, and some certainly are different people with the same name.
And with contacts moving around, you may want both of them as separate in each customer/supplier etc. Say someone changed companies and then changed their name. I would think you wouldn't want to change the name on the first company as they wouldn't know of the name change. The Quote with that contacts name should be the original, not the new one.
I don't see how Epicor could've done it any other way without producing a new way that couldn't integrate some of the old ones. And I wouldn't want a program to merge the old contacts as most of them haven't been maintained well, like misspellings, and some certainly are different people with the same name.
And with contacts moving around, you may want both of them as separate in each customer/supplier etc. Say someone changed companies and then changed their name. I would think you wouldn't want to change the name on the first company as they wouldn't know of the name change. The Quote with that contacts name should be the original, not the new one.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jennifer" <Jennifer.Lisser@...>
To: <vantage@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 9:56 AM
Subject: [Vantage] Epicor 9.05 Upgrade -- Contact Conversion Issue
> Figure I'd post this one to the group. We are testing the conversion from Vantage 8.03 to Epicor 9.05. What we've found is EVERY contact we had in 8.03 comes in as a new Person Contact in 9.05. That leaves us with 15k+ contacts, many of which are duplicates. (E.g. shop employee who is a buyer and submits expense reports = 3 contacts; customer HQ billing contact for 6 branches = 6 contacts)
>
> At this point what I'm hearing from Epicor is they don't try to merge any of the contacts (Jim Smith could be different guys and you don't want to merge them). We were hoping we could clean up key fields in 8.03 to get the merge to work up front (e.g. first name, last name, phone, fax, email all consistent) but that isn't an option.
>
> There is a way to merge contacts after the conversion but it is convoluted and time consuming -- and with 15k+ to go through it is not a solution for us.
>
> If anyone else is going through this please let me know. Right now I hear there is only 1 other company with this problem.
>
> Jenn
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]