GoldMine is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution targeted at medium-sized organisations that want to take better control of day-to-day business activities. It's powerful and can scale quite easily from one user to large user groups to suit your business, but is unintuitive to use thanks to the abundance of pop-up windows and tabs. For instance, although it allows you to create, manage and work with a huge variety of custom business entities, managing and navigating these entities can quite often turn into confusion after flipping though window after window, and tab after tab. Although GoldMine 6.5 is a high-end group-based solution that will let you take much better control of day-to-day business activities, the software's ease-of-use suffers due its plethora of Windows and options.

Pros: Powerful; customisable; Web-ready; supports PDAs
Cons: Unintuitive; requires IE 6.0; overkill for individuals


GoldMine is all about streamlining projects, contacts, sales leads and e-mail. Unlike Outlook, which is more of a single-user personal information manager, GoldMine offers tools for collecting and analysing data, which can be of great benefit to sales and marketing staff. For instance, GoldMine keeps track of customer relations, such as phone calls, letters and e-mails. You also get lots of pre-formatted business documents, such as letterheads, faxes and progress reports, as well as competent sales features, including forecasts, transactions and the ability to issue quota assignments to various employees.

Installing the software is relatively straightforward, although it's set by default to install US databases and dictionaries rather than their UK counterparts, so you'll have to make sure you alter this default selection. Also, if you intend to install GoldMine 6.5 databases (dBASE) on a network, you cannot use Universal Naming Convention (UNC) designations to install or upgrade your system. If you are installing for the first time, the GoldMine installer will not allow you to specify UNC for the install destination. If you are upgrading, you need to modify your existing GM.INI file to use mapped drive designations, instead of UNC. Finally, GoldMine 6.5 requires Internet Explorer 6.0 for HTML-based functionality, so you'll need to install the latest version of the Web browser (included on CD-ROM) if you're running an older version.

The new release of GoldMine features improved tools for recognising ACT!, Excel and Outlook files. Upon installation, the software automatically detects whether you have any of these applications installed on your computer and then prompts the conversion of existing contact data. We accepted GoldMine's offer and let it import our Outlook 2002 data, which it did relatively successfully. Unfortunately, it doesn't support Outlook's Contact categories, which rendered our database virtually useless.

GoldMine offers four main business-related functions. The first, and perhaps most important, is its client/contact management database that stores information on contacts, prospective clients and current customers, including company and contact names, addresses and telephone numbers, as well as additional information that you can define for your specific application or industry. Time and task management is handled by a Calendar that helps you to manage, schedule and track telephone calls, meetings with contacts, as well as routine mailings and faxes. You can also schedule meetings and reminders and record completed activities as contact history. Document and e-mail management is provided by the software's Link for Word, which allows you to use Microsoft's Word (version 97 or later) to create documents, insert GoldMine fields into documents and create customised letters, memos and faxes based on data from a GoldMine database without leaving the application.

The software's e-mail management features allow you to link e-mails to contacts, create e-mail templates that include GoldMine fields, and record sent e-mails linked to the contact records as contact history. If you work in a Web-aware sales office you'll be pleased to know that GoldMine data can be exported in HTML format, allowing you to provide your sales force with access to up-to-the-minute information. You can also view statistics on forecasted sales, closed sales and call success rates - as long as your team remembers to fill in data fields correctly on a regular basis!

Key new features in GoldMine 6.5 include enhanced opportunity management, including a new opportunity management wizard and new search and tracking capabilities, a centralised configuration tool to create, manage and work with an unlimited variety of custom business entities, and a redesigned Reports Center. Productivity areas have also been addressed and there's now an at-a-glance list of past activities and auto-fill options to copy data, free/busy scheduling capabilities for both users and contacts, and HTML-based alerts that notify users of status updates. Some usability enhancements have also been added in the way of auto-scrolling, navigation and drag-and-drop graphical abilities, but GoldMine 6.5 is still unintuitive and hard work to find your way around.

Links:
GoldMine Web site
GoldMine 30-day trial

BIOS, Jan 30, 04 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Business