GoldMine’s Universal Search is set to be the “default” search in the search box of the new “Left Navigation” area in GoldMine Premium. I do NOT recommend that!
First of all, the new GoldMine Universal Search capability is great when you need to find a needle in a haystack. So if you’re looking for an obscure piece of information (e.g part or serial number) that could have been stored anywhere in GoldMine and you don’t want to hunt & peck around for it GoldMine’s Universal Search is great.
Universal Search in GoldMine will return a long list of ranked search results based on all the places where it finds what you’re looking for stored in GoldMine history, notes, emails, etc. Therefore, if you’re looking for a name and you use universal search that name will come up on pending and history activites, emails and a lot more places than you need to sift through when you just want to pull up a contact who’s just called in for you. That’s what the “Contact Search Center” is better for. And, that’s what you want the quick GoldMine Navigation look-up window to use when you type your search value and press go!
Last but not least, if you haven’t implemented GoldMine Universal Search properly and you are not regularly indexing the data and you haven’t optimized the configuration in SQL and GoldMine for Universal Search to work well it is ineffective anyway. That’s one more reason to change the default.
Changing the Default Search to the Contact Search Center is not hard, but it is little tricky.
Here’s all you need to do:
1. Open up the Universal Search
2. Click “Advanced”
3. Select Options
4. Uncheck the Default setting.
You will see that there are many other settings to consider – way more than I cover here. And, there are all sorts of great search tools in GoldMine Premium! Universal Search, SQL Queries, Lookup Wizard, as well there is a lot that you can do with the Contact Search Center. An expert can show and explain these functions.
If you’re going to encourage users to capture data in GoldMine you ought to know how to find it, report it, analyze it, and use it!
