Inactivating Contacts vs. Deletion

[Tkittle]

I'm wondering if there is a way to inactive or archive contacts rather than just deleting them.  I have lots of contacts that no longer work for the companies that they were associated with; however, I don't want to delete their entire record b/c it may contain important account information.  Plus, people are always asking me, "What was that guy's name that used to work at ABC Company"?  If I delete them, I have no idea.  But, if I leave them in there, everytime I do a mass mailing, I have to sort through all of the contacts and try to remember which ones are still active.  There has to be a way to inactive them.  Thanks!!

[karthik_lk]

i don't think there is a way to make contacts inactive, but what you can do is create a new database and import all the inactive contacts into this new database

How to Import Contact Data From an Existing ACT! Database into Another ACT! Database

[csmith25]

I think I have an idea that will work for you.  Define a field and name it record status.  Create a drop down list inside of the field and add in "active" and "inactive". Then go out into the layout designer and add this field to the portion of the conact layout that you would like it to appear.  Whenever you want to mark a record as inactive just select "inactive" in the drop down menu.

Whenever you would like to do a mailing you can do an advanced query and tell the look up to not include in all records that do not contain "inactive".   

That is one way that you can easily do the things that you would like without having to go through the trouble of running multiple databases.

Chris Smith

ACT! Sales Supervisor 

[canarderrant]

FOR A SAGE EVANGELIST:

I have a database with 200,000 contacts.  50,000 are not useful to me at this time, so i have archived them with an export to a text file, and i now want to delete these contacts in the original database.  I have repeatedly tried to delete these 50,000 contact records from the database but Act freezes up.  It spends hours processing the request, and ultimately generates a diarrhea of error messages.  During this enormous digestive process MYSQL is running full out, using 1gigbyte of RAM.  I end up spending 15-30 minutes cleaning up the error messages and forcing Act to shutdown, then do a full PC restart.  Having gone through 3 cycles of this, and having lost many hours, I'm now looking for an alternative.  My current plan is to export the 150,000 records i want to keep, reimport them into a virgin database, then delete the old database. 

I would have thought that deleting records from a database would be one of the most fundamental (and fastest) tasks a database can perform. 

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this without having to create a new database?

[dlunceford]

Delete the records in batches.  Don't try to delete all of them at one time because you'll continue to have the same problem.  Think about it, when deleting a contact, it deletes all information associated to the record (history, activities, notes, etc...).  On top of that, it creates a new history entry under your records saying so and so contact has been deleted.  So the process will take some time, but in the end it will be a lot faster than importing 150,000 records.

[canarderrant]

Thanks for your response.

This is what i ended up doing...batches of 5000-10000 vs. all 50000 at once.  It was still a slow process.  

The 50000 i was deleting all contained a blank email field.  Email was also my "unique"/duplicate-checking field.  Prior to my first attempt to make the 50000 deletions, I had disabled duplicate checking to avoid incurring 50000 duplicate-check events during deletion. 

In the end, I set a different field (contact field) as the unique field for duplicate checking (and I left dup-checking set on), and this seemed to facilitate the deletion process.  It doesn't make a lot of sense, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to isolate the "unique" field from the field that was being used to create the selection for which i was making deletes.

[acting now]

My reply is to Tkittle:

What I have done (because I have wanted to retain access to defunct records for the same reasons) is to mirror the ID/Status with a leading "X". So that the ID/Status Architects would also have X-Architects, Employees would also have X-Employees.

The beauty of that is that you don't have to physically open another database.

If it's say an X-Prospect and you get a call, all of their info is right there.

AND, the X throws them alphabetically to the bottom of the list!

(That way you don't have to scroll through them all the time!) 

[Annette]

Hello,  I am trying to perform this task that you have suggested to creat a drop down for active/inactive customers.  I am still learing with ACT 16.0.291.0.HOTFIX5.  Can you please let me know how to "define a field" so I can make a start on your suggestion?  Not sure where to look!  Thank you