Product Reviews

This product may be called GoldMine Business Contact Manager, but if you're expecting a glorified Outlook clone, you're in for a shock. Like it or not, Outlook is the world's most popular contact management software, but most people use it as little more than an email address book. With a bit of code and some custom forms, it can provide the platform for a custom CRM system, but it soon starts to strain when you need to track contact histories and provide a platform for easy, consistent and managed communications with customers.

This is where something designed specifically for the job makes more sense. For most of us, that means either GoldMine or its older rival ACT! (see Reviews, issue 97, p150). This is serious CRM software, rather than mere contact management. FrontRange is aiming Business Contact Manager 6 at SoHo users, but I don't recommend it unless you're going it alone after working for a large company that used GoldMine.

Even the startup screens can be a little intimidating. However, as we'll see, FrontRange has worked hard to make your early experiences as trouble-free as possible. Things will be pretty painless for those moving to GoldMine from previous versions or other contact management software, but for everyone else the effort FrontRange has put into its QuickStart Wizard will be invaluable.

There's a series of things to be done when you start using GoldMine, and the Wizard takes you through all but one. The elusive missing step is actually finding the QuickStart Wizard, which isn't nearly as straightforward as it should be. Once you locate it among the clutter around the left toolbar, it encourages you to enter personal information. If you're using the product standalone, you'll have already entered this during the startup phase, but otherwise you'll need to add it yourself, and create new accounts if you're the administrator.

The next step, however, is where the product's thin veneer of UK localisation wears through. It's possible to load a series of 'templates',

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which customise the product for different industries covering financial services, insurance, legal services, mortgage lending and 'real estate'. That said, while they often contain US-specific data, they're still more useful than starting from scratch - just alter some of the contact fields, screens, document templates and reports. After you've customised fields, imported data, set up email information and linked sales-related documents, you're ready to go.

Keeping your sales efforts in order outside the routine contact work is simple with GoldMine's Wizards, which cover everything from managing sales opportunities through to database backup and a reassuring restore feature. There's a customisable My GoldMine screen, with links to most of the major tasks in the software, but for most people the central tool will be the improved Contact Search Center. From here, you can find contacts, send letters or faxes, record details of meetings or review all past activities.

In fact, the only real disappointment of GoldMine was its painfully slow synchronisation with Outlook. This could be a serious issue when working with other Outlook users, especially if you need to keep your contact information up to date in both GoldMine and Outlook. If you're doing a one-off migration, it becomes a pain. In fact, it was so annoying that I gave up and exported my Outlook contacts to dBase format and imported them instead, which only took a couple of minutes.

So what's new since the last version? Existing GoldMine users probably won't notice a lot - most of the changes are architectural - but there are some detailed differences. GoldMine's XML handling, for example, is now ahead of ACT! 6. The main differences are in the 'sales automation' area, where GoldMine can track opportunities through the sales pipeline and provide management reporting information. Along with XML support, there's also HTML help and plenty of other goodies for customising GoldMine or integrating it with another program.

If you've been trying to manage your sales contacts with Outlook - particularly if you share a pool of contacts across a sales team - you probably already know you need something better. If you work in a product sales business - or one of those supported by GoldMine and its third-party partners - you should start by looking at GoldMine. It isn't for the faint-hearted, but for most small and medium-sized businesses it provides all the tools you need. Look at it as a start to instilling the discipline you'll need when you become a FTSE 100 company running a large-enterprise CRM system.