Problem: Duplicated profiles in Workbench

Problem

Searching for an individual in the Workbench returns multiple matching profiles that all represent the same individual (i.e. duplicated profiles).

Other descriptions of the issue:

• Licensee or applicant has duplicate profiles
• Multiple results for same licensee or applicant
• Portal user can't log in because they have multiple accounts

Conditions

• Where: Workbench, in the Profile entity (reg_profile), most commonly accessed via the Register module
• Who: Affects any user with access to the Workbench
• When: While viewing the Record List view, usually while using the search function

Cause

There are two scenarios that can cause multiple profile records to be created for a single licensee or applicant:

• Licensee data migrated into a Thentia Cloud environment already contained duplicate profiles for some licensees.
• A licensee with an existing Portals account activates a new account on the Application Portal instead of signing in to their existing account.
  • Note: Thentia Cloud Portals will prevent users from creating a new account if the specified email address has already been registered, but users with an existing account will be able to create a new account under a different email address.

Steps to resolve

Duplicate profiles can cause problems with Portal sign in as well as confusion with regard to license applications, renewals, etc. As a result, each individual licensee (or applicant) should only have a single profile in your Thentia Cloud environment.

To resolve the issue of duplicate profiles, you should manually merge them into a single profile.

To  manually merge duplicate profiles, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Workbench and open the Profile entity.
2. Identify and open all profile records that may be duplicates of one another (relate to the same person).
3. Verify that the identified profile records are duplicates of one another by carefully comparing names, emails, and other profile information.
4. After you have confirmed that the records are duplicates, identify which of the duplicate records you want to keep as the "primary" profile record. In general, this should be the most complete profile record.
   • Tip: To avoid confusion between profiles, we recommend changing the name fields on profile records to clearly identify them as duplicates, e.g. "John Smith Duplicate 1", "John Smith Duplicate 2", etc.
5. For each duplicate profile record, go to the record's Record View and perform the following steps:
   1. Go through the This Record section to find information that is missing or different from the primary profile record, then copy the information to the primary profile record as needed.
      • In some cases, you may need to contact licensee to resolve discrepancies or conflicting information.
   2. Go through the Connections section to find any connected records. For every connected record you find, open the connected record, then change the Profile field on the connected record to the primary profile record you designated: this will associate the connected record with the primary profile record, and remove the connection to the duplicate profile record.
   3. After you have transferred all relevant information and connected records from a duplicate profile record, click on the Delete button in the menu bar to delete it.
6. After repeating these steps for all duplicate records, you should have successfully merged all the duplicates into the primary record.
   • Note: If the duplication was caused by a licensee/applicant registering for multiple accounts, we recommend following up with the individual to prevent the issue from happening again.