This was a headache for us, we just found one of our customers who had 2 contact records with 100 incidents on each (he'd misspelled his details on chat). Me and my fellow admin hate moving one incident at a time, and can see there’ nothing planned so we decided we were going to find a workaround…..
We are only interested in moving incidents, but you could bulk move any uniquely identifieddata using this method. People mentioned surveys - not sure as don’t use them - but as long as you can put it in a report and it has a unique identifier (like incident ref), then this should work…
Method used…..
Create a report with one column from the Incidents table, which will be your list of related incidents:
incidents.ref_no
Create a filter for the report from the Contacts table for Contact ID:
contact.c_id
Her’s a screenshot of the report definition
Set the report Inline Editing to "Allow", then select your Editable columns and tick the box available for the report (says Standard Report in my case)
We named the new report "Simple Incident Report - Multi Edit" and saved it....
Next we set the “Incident Multi Edit” workspace under Admin Profile to one that we could edit, by copying the standard multi edit workspace. We opened the multi edit Incident workspace and added the "Contact" field (as below). Save & Close the workspace
Open the Admin workspace for Contacts, and add a tab (We called the tab"Incidents for Merging"). Add to that tab the report you made earlier - the report being"Simple Incident Report - Multi Edit" in our case.
Now, when you have 2 contacts that you wish to merge multiple incidents for, open the Contact record of the Contact you wish to move the incidents FROM, and go to the tab with the new report. It will show a list of all incidents, which you can multi select by holding down shift and selecting all the Incidents(or CTRL & multiple Incidents)
Right Click on the selected Incidents list, and choose "Open". This will open all of the selected incidents for edit in your "Incident Multi Edit Workspace"
(Tab with new report below. Screenshot shows multiple Incidents selected)
Once in the Multi Edit Workspace, you just hit the little Magnifying Glass, or Right Click on the Contact field and select “Search”
You select the Contact with which you wish to merge the Incidents, Save & Close and then check the new contact. The Incidents have been moved over in bulk.
Check the old contact, the incidents have now gone.
If you need to, move the email address from the old contact to Email Alt 1 on the new Contact, and delete the old contact record.
We finally figured this out today, it then took us about 10 mins to do the work putting the reports and workspaces together, then moved over the 100 records from one contact to the other in about 30 seconds.
It’s going to make our lives as Admins a lot easier – hopefully it helps others….
Let me know if you spot any flaws, or there are any improvements you can suggest to the method….