GOLDMINE 6.5 1U INSTALL PACK ( GMSIP0165 )

Rating:
Summary: What I wish I knew before buying GM ...
Review: First, I never write these reviews, but I feel that I must based on the information that is available under the reviews as they are incredibly polarized and only vaguely helpful.

Second, my rating would be 4.5 stars, but Amazon doesn't allow that. I would rate it five stars except for the support issue which many see as a problem. I actually think it is not - more below.

Third, I'm a huge Goldmine fan (GM) - I purchased mine on Amazon at the end of Aug 2004 - and I am completely hooked. I am currently recommending this program to anyone that needs any type of customer relationship management (CRM) software for any business because it will do anything that you can imagine. Yes, GM does has warts, but so does salesforce.com, or Act (which I have used in the past) or anything else - and this is a VERY cheap and INCREDIBLY powerful product for what it can do.

I consider myself to be very computer savvy and to get GM working the way that you want it too, this is helpful, but ACT! also requires some user savvy to work too. I wish that I had known the following before I purchased GM from Amazon:

1. (Acutally I did this.) Free 30-day trial from www.frontrange.com - so try it before you buy it (but buy it here - Amazon has the cheapest prices).
2. There is no support (hence less than 5 stars) from Frontrange. However there are a enormous amount of people out there who can (and will) help you.
3. It really helps if you are technologically inclined before you purchase this product because, although you can use it straight out of the box, to make GM really work you will need to modify this program to your needs (same as ACT!). Frankly, if you're not techologically inclined, don't get ACT! either - stay with MS Outlook.
4. You can read the manual for this product at www.frontrange.com, and you can also dowload two 450+ page manuals written by Frontrange that will help you understand what GM can and cannot do. (Does this sound like a lot of work for a $165 product? - sure, but this product is worth the effort - would you trust your data to chance? The cost of bad data, and a poorly designed and not particularly powerful product is a lot more than $165!!)
5. This product will do ANYTHING that you need if you're looking for a database. Yes, ANYTHING. Hence to get value (it does work straight out of the box and it is a very nice product) but it really excels when you customize it. Any database is only as good as your ideas for making it work.
6. Since August I have entered more than 100,000 contacts into GM - I'm in a contact intensive field - and this program is invaluable for keeping in contact with people. Excellent reminders for everything - one nice feature: you can set the alarm so that GM sends you a text message to your phone telling you that you have an appointment and the text includes the other person's tel number. Saved me from missing meetings and calls on a number of occassions - worth $165 right there.
7. This is a FULL working database - and it is EXTREMELY fast and compact - for example I had 25,000 contacts in Outlook and it was Molasses trying to get around it - it was close to 600MB, not including emails. GM WHIZZES - the same DB is a trim 150MB, with much faster look ups. However, like any other database it requires a lot of effort on behalf of the user to ensure that the product is changed so that it works the way you want it too - GM can do whatever your imagination wants.
8. If more than one person is going to access the database, then you have to get GM - it is incredibly easy for multiple users to access the database. This product is exceptionally scaleable. You can have 1 person or 100s of people working the same DB
9. The best support is through what I would loosely term the "GM community." Through the frontrange website you can access a newsgroup (look under the support) where people post questions which are answered by people who subscribe to the community. There is a wealth of information there. However, if you're the sort of person that gets scared at the idea that you might have to understand what the computer is doing, then stick with Outlook. GM will work fine without any effort by you, but with a little effort you can have it do email merge, show you each contact's website from within the database. Even ACT! requires SOME effort. There are a large number of GM consultants who do charge money for their services - in many ways this is no different than microsoft or many of the other large companies. Many of these consultants publish answers to questions on the newsgroup for no charge. Let's face it, if it's a business threatening emergency wouldn't you want a specialist to be able to get to work right away? With so many consultants available there is nearlys always one on hand.
10. The mail merge feature alone is INVALUABLE and easy to use, (although it is not a full HTML email product). You can, however, still use Outlook as your e-mail client, with the advantage that your Goldmine address book can be hidden from the Outlook directory. Outlook is FULLY integrated. So when you get an email in Outlook, GM automatically appends a reference to that message to a contact in it's database, so that you have all of that person's messages in the one place.
11. It is incredibly easy to import data into GM.
12. You can have live links to documents - documents referenced within a GM database are only "linked" - i.e. if you worked on it today, and you click it from with a GM contact, then you get the updated doc.
13. It is incredibly easy to keep on top of a long list of tasks. I regularly make upward of 100 phonecalls a day, with follow on calls required many times because I don't get people. I NEED a product where I (and the person that I'm hoping to hire) can find all of our interaction with one client, and all in one place. Under each contact in GM you can store all of the emails, telephone calls, actions that you have taken, appointments, etc.
14. The lookup feature is a little quirky and not what I was expecting. It took me a little getting used to (a few hours) but once you get the hang of it, it is really fast and efficient.

Overall:

strengths - alsolutely robust, an intelligent, well put together product with an exceptional value for the price - the best $165 I've spent in years. Obviously, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this product.

Weaknesses - lack of support from Frontrange, requires the user to read up on the product and want to work with it.

Rating:
Summary: very good package for knowledgeable PC users
Review: Get this product if you're a savvy PC user. Then, you'll be amazed at it's functionality. If you half-the-time can't figure out how to make your PC work, then don't get this progranm as it will blow you away. Simple fact--the more powerful the software, the more knowledgeable the user must be to harvest the functionality and this is one powerful package. I run a mutil-million dollar company with it and used it when there was just one employee. So it's grown with the needs of a rapidly growing company. Other people that wrote reviews here complained about the support. If you need lots of support, again--this is not the package for you anyway. Their support is not good but who cares--can you read a manual? They have trained consultants throughout the US if you do need face to face support or customization.

Rating:
Summary: Specialized program for people who already have it.
Review: I have had and used Maximizer, Outlook/Exchange, ACT 2000 and Goldmine in the last 8 years. I own and run a small investment firm. Contact database management is obviously REALLY important for us. Brokers Ally was another contact database that we tried but the old versions really sucked IMO and they were not very good with integrating with a networked usage (great standalone) and they were horrible with synching with palms and pocket pc's. We currently run Goldmine 6.5 (GM)

We currently have a 5 user (GM) group with 3 full time, one part time and interns that log in occassionally. The ability to control adding, deleting, even changing fields by user, designation/groups is great. This is a very customizeable database (GM). It honestly has features that we don't even come close to using that we could or maybe even should.

As long as your computer is good. good memory, good hard drive, decent processor...it's pretty dang fast. We have a 5 year history with almost 1 gig of tables and data and we have had few problems. We don't backup enough, nor sort, verify the data enough either....but we're fine.

act is a darn good program also. i'd almost use that also. but we're already instaled with goldmine so we keep it. it interfaces with palms, clies, pocket pc's etc..just fine using companionlink (awesome program). you have to know a bit about databases and linking data to get it just right for synching...but companionlink can walk you through that.

As the previous review mentioned...support is pretty spotty and weak. The 'online' knowledge base is decent but not extremely comprehensive. there have been some issues i've resolved myself after working on it and thinking things through that were not on the knowledge base.

I find that goldmine does NOT have to have a fast processor or too much memory to run well. We currently run almost 4 users at any time with 5 sometimes and it's very fast in pulling up data from any page, any table, etc... and the computer we're on is..(don't laugh). a pentium II 400 mhz with 356 mb and two 40 gig drives mirrored on ata-66.

it's moving to a pentium 4-3 gig with 1 gig mem, and mirror RAID with 400 gig SATA drives...and i can't imagine it running much faster. there really is almost no lag...

if you know computers and have occassional time to play around with fields...this is a great program. ACT was great too and has similar functions.

oh yeah...i've NEVER had a virus/email problem that everyone else with outlook has. THAT unto itself is a HUGE seller for me. HUGE....


Rating:
Summary: Pay for Goldmine three times over if you need support.
Review: The seduction is the software itself: its well laid out, intuitive, quick, flexible - everything you'd want. ONE HITCH: they have ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORT execept at outrageous rates and very fuzzy definitions of "help" and "problem". They're like the Capital One ad's "No!-man". If I hadn't already spent so much of my time on it I'd junk it for ACT.

Rating:
Summary: One of the worst programs I've ever bought
Review: This is absolutely one of the worst software purchases I've ever made. It's difficult to learn (and I was a software engineer for 15 years, so I'm not new at this), it's buggy (I tried to do mail-merge the other day and it simply wouldn't work), and support is non-existent.

Just take a look at the forums on their website. Instead of having a helpful knowledge base, they depend on user-to-user support and consultants to make their product work.

To be fair, I've talked to people who use older versions of GM and they say it's a good product. Also, the GM/Outlook synchronization works well.

On the other hand, the GM/Word link doesn't work much more of the time than it works. I don't know how many times I've re-installed it. And apparently, FrontRange doesn't keep the resources on their website up-to-date so when you download a version of the GM/Word link, you're not sure whether you're getting the latest version (again, take a look at the forums).

It's been a complete headache since the day I installed it.

Rating:
Summary: Too Complex and Support Sucks
Review: Truly a piece of crap. Dozens of useless bells and whistles that add complexity but no utility. An entire industry of third party Goldmine consultants exists to charge you big bucks to make it do what it should do out of the box. The product is unstable and crashes frequently, sometimes destroying your data along the way. GoldMine support, if you can actually reach them, expects you to be a database wizard and patronizes you and gets impatient if you ask questions. For a while they eliminated support entirely, then offered email only and took two weeks to respond to me while my company sat dead in the water. Buy ANYTHING else. These people don't deserve your business.