Product Reviews

If you're serious about CRM (customer relationship management), as opposed to just needing a glorified address book, there are only really two contenders for the heavyweight contacts management crown: ACT! and GoldMine. ACT! has the advantage of being cheaper and is easier to use. But for sheer power GoldMine takes some beating.

Once you've understood GoldMine isn't about contact management but customer relationship management, you'll start to appreciate the depth of control and access provided. For a one-man band, this program is complete overkill; it's squarely targeted at small businesses and above, with a specific focus on the sales team. A really small organisation is probably better off with either ACT! or a combination of Outlook and a third-party groupware plug-in. For the larger organisation, or a smaller one scaling up, GoldMine is a real contender.

But first, you must be prepared to put the effort in and get past the complexity of the user interface. We welcome a number of new wizards, for those important but mundane tasks, but there's no escaping the fact that GoldMine remains a complex application when it comes to navigation. And this is despite new interface improvements by way of drag and drop, auto-scrolling and more.

This version at least eases the process of importing and converting existing contact data from ACT!, Excel and Outlook (98 and higher). During the installation process, GoldMine automatically prompts the user to convert any existing contacts in these formats - and does so with minimal fuss. In the case of Outlook, for example, this new feature not only imports Contacts, Calendar and Tasks data with no manual manipulation, but allows for the migration of email messages to GoldMine, so archived material isn't lost.

So what else is new in this version other than the installation and data-conversion tweaks? Well, the Excel link enables simple merging of GoldMine contact record fields into a spreadsheet, and calendar publishing by way of the 'iCalendar' function makes for better team working. The calendar publishing allows non-GoldMine users to share the information by posting them to the Web or directly to contacts. XML data import and export handling is now ahead of the rest of the marketplace, and the wizard approach makes it the painless process

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Another major enhancement is the inclusion of a new Record Types Administration Centre. This makes short work of both defining and managing the customised combinations of primary field views, GM+ views and custom screens, which, when linked together, form GoldMine 'entities'. These are at the heart of GoldMine, enabling you to define different rules for different entities, such as customers, prospects and so on.

The admin centre handles record creation, configuration and management within a simple interface, and its uses aren't to be underestimated. This goes beyond the basic contact-centric B2C modelling of other CRM products, defining record types and criteria that can be evaluated on the fly. The screen design toolbar allows simple customisation of the upper four panes of a contact record, or more precisely how they are viewed. This enables fields to be hidden, colour and label changes to be made for specific record types and saved as a primary field view. The end result being different views for different business needs but still while working within a single database.

The reports centre has been overhauled and the new design simplifies the management of both built-in and Crystal-based reporting, replacing the old reports window with a tree-view and two list views within a three-pane window. Back in GoldMine 5.7, something called 'Meeting Request' support was introduced, and this has been significantly improved by adding real-time schedule co-ordination or 'free/busy scheduling'. This means team members who can't access GoldMine directly can exchange free/busy information across the Internet, automatically. GoldMine users can also publish these free/busy schedules on demand or by using server agents on a recurring basis so that remote users (GoldMine, Outlook, Lotus Notes or iCalendar) can pull the data into their own applications when scheduling.

Other less glamorous but equally important new features include a forced/required data field entry capability to improve data integrity at the chalk face (an override audit function prevents it being too strict when required information isn't actually available); interactive workflow prompting to prevent problems before they occur; and the ability to configure GoldSync as a service. An instant sync feature can also detect a network login from a remote user and start synchronising automatically.

Productivity improvements are at the heart of this upgrade: at-a-glance listing of past activities, auto-fill options for one-click data entry, HTML-based alerts and enhanced opportunity management by way of wizards and new search/tracking capabilities. This makes upgrading a must for existing GoldMine users. In fact, anyone still struggling to manage sales teams and customer relationships using Outlook plus add-ons - a Heath-Robinson approach by comparison - should investigate this program.