I could accomplish this through an AppExchange App and a Chrome browser extension. Would people be willing to install a Chrome extension for each user and an App to get this functionality?

Paul phrased this really nicely and gave some additional recommendations that would be even more helpful. We're very much just doing inactive vs active and right now we're handling it in an incredibly messy way that leads to all sorts of errors that we didn't have when we were on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

For the last 4 orgs I've given SFDC, it's entirely an active/inactive switch. There will never be a transition back from inactive, nor a dormant status. The industries I'm in have a high turnover of employees. It's both important to know what the previous conversations were and with whom, so they can be referenced when discussing history with new contacts, so deleting contacts is not appropriate. But often we discover that an employee has retired, changed employers, left the industry, died, or something else, and the first clue is often from an email hard bounce. While I can mark that contact "do not email" that doesn't tell me anything about why I shouldn't email them (unsubscribe is not the same has no longer employed). It's rare that a company changes its email address format, and those are simple updates, not inactivations. But when a contact is truly gone from a company, I don't want to count them in my list of contacts (or reports). I don't want someone not familiar with the contact's departure to reach out by phone (or email) and be told a second or third time that they're no longer with the company if we knew it from before. 

If there's a replacement contact for the role, I would like to have some ability to relate one contact to the other (inactive general manager shows "replaced by" new general manager contact). If I'm running a report to list all contacts with the title "general manager," it should easily or automatically exclude inactive contacts. It would separately also be helpful to be able to run a report against inactive contacts to see if we have yet identified their replacement (inactive contacts with no replacement referenced), and make that a sales/support activity. Yes, sometimes there will be no direct replacement, but "replacement" could simply be a redirection indicating with whom previous relationship activity should be continued in lieu of the inactive contact.

If sometimes I find that a contact has moved companies, I create a new contact for the other account. I usually create a note or log a call about the transition from one company to the other. I'm not dragging contact history from the old account to the new placement. 

"Not Interested" is an opportunity status, not an inactive contact status. The same with "dormant." Inactive for me only means left the company, whether it be retirement, transition to another company, or death. I do imagine that there are some contacts who have a temporary no contact status because of sabbatical, extended illness, or something like that. It's not a circumstance for us, but in those situations, I would probably log a call detailing the suspension and schedule a task on a specific date to reconnect. I might choose to check "do not email" too and make it a step to uncheck on that reconnection task date. To make it simpler, I consider the "inactive" label to describe a permanent state, not temporary. Someone who says, "Don't call me until 6 months from now." is not inactive. They're handled the same way I handle contacts who say, "I'm busy now. Call me next week when I can talk."

 

Might not be the best idea but would it be possible to just add a field to the object to define that you want it to be inactive.
That should enable you to apply a filter so that it isn't in your search list.

If you wanted something more effective you could create a scheduled task and "delete all the records" that have been flagged as inactive for x period of time. Any records left in the recycle bin for 15 days will be permanently deleted though.

Not sure how the "garbage collection" works on the recycle bin however it may be possible to have another schedule task that undeletes and redeletes these records once a week so that they never permanently get deleted. 

Check the rules for deleting and undeleting records to make sure this will be viable for you.
Please note there are also restrictions arround scheduled task to ensure the SF performance is to a high standard for all users please refer to these before implementing something along the lines of this.

In its most simple form, having Inactive status records removed from search results would be most helpful, in addition to not showing them in Related Lists at the OWD level. Thanks!

This is desperately required by our users as the search function is hindered constantly displaying inactive contacts or accounts. This is essential standard functionality.

Hi Karen!  For me it would be Contacts Active vs Inactive, where inactive contacts would no longer appear in search/lookups in the system by default.  Accounts would be the same, but I can see the argument for a dormant setting as well.  Coming from Microsoft Dynamics in the past, the active vs inactive system worked fairly well and was intuitive for users.  Once we moved to Salesforce the team was very frustrated as to why all these irrelevant contacts were showing up on their feeds and especially lookups when searching.  We had to do a fair amount of custom work for something that really seems to be a basic need and should be built in.  At my previous employer we found that most of the time when we wanted to set as inactive it was due to retirement, someone leaving the industry, etc.  However, when new contacts were added it was part of our process to have the duplicate rules look at inactive contacts to see if there was a fuzzy match.  It wasn't perfect either but it certainly beats having to do custom work in Salesforce and making the decision to delete contacts from the system or not.  It's dissapointing that this is not on the current roadmap, especially when it has been requested for 13 years and is one of the top ideas overall. 

I also would need such helpful feature, and could not find it. While they are working on this, I help myself by putting the word INACTIVE in the field telephone (not mobile phone) and replace it. The telephone field is mostly showed up in the preview list. To remove this contact permanently from my pre-defined picklist, I set the filter criteria on field "telephone" + operator "not equal" + value "INACTIVE". The contact will disappear in the picklist but stays in the record for future researches. Hope this helps. 

We would like to see 'Archived' flag added to contacts, and Approapriate status for Accounts - Active, Inactive, Dormant-Inactive, etc. This is much required.

Thank you all for dedication to this idea. We hear you and recognize that it's a highly desirable feature, but at the moment it's not on our upcoming roadmap. We'll still continue to revisit this idea as we review our backlog for future releases. Some follow up questions: Is this just about Active vs Inactive, or do you need to manage additional customer life time stage transitions such as Inactive - Dormant, or Inactive - no longer interested or retired or deceased etc? How does your organization handle the transition back and forth between Inactive and Active status?

Use case: John Smith is the key decision maker for years at XYZ company.  He gets promoted and now there is a new decision maker.  We don't want to lose all of the history for John Smith, but we want our reps to know that he is no longer an active contact.  We also want to make sure we aren't sending marketing information to him any longer.  

12 years! 54,520 points!  Seriously, Salesforce?!

Would be a very helpful function and preserves custom code / re-assignment /additional filter on custom fields

All my customers ask for it.

This should not be a custom field. It is standard in most CRM products. Salesforce- BOO!

Some follow up questions: Is this just about Active vs. Inactive, or do you need to manage additional customer lifetime stage transitions such as Inactive - Dormant, or Inactive - no longer interested or retired or deceased, etc.? How does your organization handle the transition back and forth between Inactive and Active status?