We have a lot of contacts in CRM 2011 which are imported to support a legacy application. All these contacts have a field which is set to be true to indicate that we don't show these on any of the views.
I am looking at a way to exclude these from the Create/Update duplicate detection that can be enabled on contacts.
These contacts are currently read only so for now my solution is to deactivate those records so I can use the 'exclude de-activated records' option.
This feels like a bit of a hack, is there not a way of telling the duplicate detection which sub set of contacts to check against?
Deactivating would definitely be one way to get around it. If you don't want them deactivated, you can migrate that field to another field that dupe checking is allowed on since CRM doesn't allow dupe checking on two option fields, and then use an exact match on that field instead.
If you don't have a ton of records in that subset, you can do an advanced find and bulk edit the new field 250 records at a time.