If anyone out there has a large salesforce.com account with a few duplicate accounts it would be great if you could test out my account de-duper. The current beta version does not do any merging of the accounts, contacts, oppertunities yet but the first 2 steps do work and they will show you all of the duplicate account names in your setup and will allow you to export those duplicate names to a CSV file.
The idea of the tool is that it uses a "Replace List" to clean account names by replacing things like "&" and "+" with "and" and will trim off known suffixes like "Inc." You can even force a more unique search by including the billing city or any other custome salesforce.com account field. This way I.B.M. Inc. in New York will not match IBM Corp in Chicago, but, if the city was not used they would match.
You can grab the setup from the URL below and you will need the .NET framework installed in order for it to run.
Here is a screen grab of the first and second page. You can force master accounts on the second page by just right clicking on the account name.
I'll be dropping up some sample code later on to show you how to convert the return from the sforce webservice account query directally into a .NET datasource. It's only a couple of lines of code but I'm sure that you'll find it usefull in building complex application.
