Merge
What It Is
A merge is the attempt to carry out an approved plan and the retained account of that attempt. Success combines participating contacts or organizations into one survivor and removes the other records. Failure records a reason without applying a partial combination. The survivor keeps its own identity, while aliases identify where the absorbed records went.
Staff can distinguish the attempted work from the plan that described it. A plan may have failed attempts before a successful one, and each attempt retains its own outcome. The merge record preserves the originals and explains the result rather than requiring staff to reconstruct it from a collection of unrelated edits. That account matters because the absorbed records no longer exist as ordinary records.
What It Is Not
A merge is not an ordinary deletion or an archive action. It moves or deliberately retains related references according to the preview and leaves identity aliases. It is also not a reversible operation. The retained originals support investigation and recreation, but they do not supply an automatic undo that reconstructs the entire earlier situation across applications.
How It Is Used
An administrator confirms the reviewed plan and follows the background job. The worker locks affected records, recomputes the material preview and performs the approved changes in one transaction. Changed data or a participant refusal ends the attempt without partial record movement. Reconciliation prevents a lost job start from remaining indefinitely unexplained.
After success, staff inspect the outcome to understand values kept, gaps filled and information discarded. A record reader can see the successful merges in that record's lineage without management authority. Management readers receive additional execution details. Integrations and old console links use absorbed identities to reach the survivor, even when it has subsequently been merged again.
Its Facets
Status and failure distinguish queued, running, succeeded and failed attempts and explain refusals. The job supplies visible progress and recovery for lost execution. Original values preserve the records as they were, while the outcome connects final values to sources and attributed choices.
Relationship and login actions record movement, combination and preserved references. Audit pointers and announcements connect the merge to record history and contact-event subscribers. History and retention make those outcomes inspectable over the workspace lifetime.
Absorbed identity is a facet of the merge. Its survivor pointer is redirected when that survivor merges again, so earlier identities resolve directly. Its merge reference keeps the original absorption event and time. Original numbers and integration identities support older lookups. The reuse guard prevents an absorbed identity from being assigned to a new record of the same type. Record responses identify merging rather than ordinary absence, and lineage remains readable through the survivor.
How It Relates
The merge executes a plan, changes records owned by Entities and invokes related changes owned by other applications. Duplicate review decisions about outsiders can transfer to the survivor. Platform owns the durable job infrastructure and audit trail, while CRM retains the merge outcome. Workspace export includes that retained evidence and its aliases.
What It Could Become
The product should implement the recorded privacy-removal commitment for individual original values. It should repair alias destinations after hard deletion of a survivor and expose survivor resolution for reports retaining absorbed identities. Product also needs to settle whether organization merges should announce an event like contact merges. These extensions should preserve atomic execution and the distinction between retained history and current identity.