Goldmine Vs. Outlook – Round 2
Sep 14, 2008 
7 Comments
It has to be nearly 10 years ago that I first got introduced to the CRM software package called GoldMine. I was working for a small company at the time and I quickly realized the power GoldMine had in saving information and attaching it to a person or company. When I started up a side business writing some software, I went ahead and purchased my own copy of GoldMine to use at the house to keep in contact with my customers. I ditched Eudora and GoldMine became my default email client.
By this time the company I was working for started it’s rapid growth. We now had something like 25 or 30 licenses for the software. The problem we had was that this growth sorta came on in fits and spurts so we never took the time to get GoldMine set up properly to handle such a large volume of users and because of it we constantly had troubles and the employees who had to use it began to hate it. Myself included. It wasn’t too much longer before we gave up using GoldMine entirely at the office, though I was still using it at home for my personal contacts.
Fast forward a couple years and I had sold off my little side business. All my customers and support issues went along with it. My need for a CRM was long gone. GoldMine became a bit too much to deal with when it came to using it simply as an email client. I had just purchased a new computer and it came with a copy of Outlook, so I decided to give it a try. I was able to set up some folders for keeping work and personal emails separate. I set up some rules for dealing with several types of messages. I set up distribution lists for sending out monthly newsletters. Things were good. Outlook was working for me just fine! GoldMine began to collect dust.
I always suspected I would have the need for a CRM again. That need showed it’s head this past week. As I’m starting to make several connections with people in order to organize the WordCamp:Las Vegas event, it’s quickly become obvious that Outlook just isn’t going to cut it.
The problem I was running in to was that I would send out 10 requests for information. I’d get a few replies and I’d reply back. The email threads would start to get jumbled as my inbox would have portions of all these conversations going on at once. And, if you have somebody you are emailing back and forth with who doesn’t quote the previous messages in the email, you need to go back and forth between the “sent” folder and inbox in order to piece back together what was said.
How GoldMine can save you time and confusion
With GoldMine, ever email to or from a specific contact is saved on their record. There’s a date stamp and an indication if it was an inbound or outbound email. Double-click the message to see what was sent, and then use the previous/next buttons to bounce your way through the email chain of events.
This weekend I decided it was time to make the switch back. I resigned myself to the fact that I had a BIG task in front of me. I didn’t want to just pick up and start using GoldMine again leaving a 2 year gap in email history sitting over in Outlook. I needed to import all the new contacts, update any existing ones that may have changed, import all the emails from Outlook and connect them all to the proper contacts. The task seemed daunting.
Getting Started
Knowing how big this task was going to be, before I got started I had to make sure that there would be a way for me to sync my contacts to iPhone. Currently, it doesn’t appear that there is. I did, however, figure out that I can export a group of contacts from GoldMine, import it in to Outlook and then sync from there. This is a one-way push, though. I’m not able to update records on the iPhone and have that information sync to GoldMine. I’m going to do some further research on this and hope to stream line the processes.
The process
The first thing I did was export my Outlook contacts and imported them in to GoldMine. I had to clean up a few duplicate entries that came from this process, but it was still quicker than hand editing a few dozen contacts. Next I went through all the contacts removed some unneeded ones and manually added a few that were missing. Next I added all my email accounts (I have at least 6) to GoldMine so it could check them all. I then removed them all from Outlook so it wouldn’t auto-check for email if I had to log in there for some reason. Then the fun part, I imported the entire inbox from outlook in to GoldMine. This process took nearly 30 minutes to complete. The final step was, of course, the most time consuming. For the next 3 hours I went through the inbox and linked email messages to contacts. I had sorted the inbox alphabetically by sender, so when I would update one incoming email to attach it to a contact, all other emails from that same email address would be updated automatically. So really I (usually) only needed to touch one email per sender. I could then highlight all their incoming emails and hit the “FastFile” button to store them on the record and remove them from the inbox.
Even though it was a healthy amount of time taken out of my weekend, I certainly feel it’s worth it. Being able to keep straight all of the email conversations without having to jump too many hoops would be a very welcome change.
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Trying to find info on setting up an “out-of-office” reply to customers emailing in.
Have any suggestions?
Using GM 8.02.802.08 Feb 2008
Any help would be appreciated.
thanks,
@Raymond I'm using GoldMine 6, so I'm not 100% sure how you'd do it in version 8, there may be an easier way. In v.6, you need to first create an email template (you do that from the mail center) and then you will need to configure it to send as a reply to the emails that get sent in. You will also need to leave GoldMine running while you are out of town.
You may want to check with your hosting company to see if they have an out of office message tool. If your host provides cPanel, I believe you'll be able to do it right from there.
Hope that helps
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it is mr same problem,thanks
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great reviews. this is helpful thanks