With any major release it’s a story of the “good, bad, and the ugly.” GoldMine 9.x is out of the gate and now we’ll all start to find things that may be intended or otherwise, but which might be helpful to be aware of either going into the upgrade or after the fact. This post is intended to provide First Direct customers and GMS subscribers alike, an opportunity to post their findings of things to watch out for.
To begin with, it goes without saying that MANY of the details you’ll find are already listed in the “Read Me” and “Release Notes,” but I don’t have any problem with redundancy – so feel free to comment on any points that may be listed in those documents if you feel that warrant reinforcement.
By the way, First Direct upgraded our 15 plus year old legacy GoldMine and for the most part things went very smoothly – an extremely encouraging sign. Surely there will be issues, an no doubt the FrontRange Support desk is hopping with maintenance calls! For First Direct support customers we are happy to do your upgrade for you or with you, so please don’t hesitate to ask!
GoldMine Premium Edition 9.x has a new update in BETA. 9.01.27 was released to the BETA group on 10/14/10 for BETA testing. For more about that.
Here’s the start of the “Upgrade Heads-up List” in the order they are posted:
1. The first thing you may notice after the upgrade is that your screens (primary and custom views) have fields with labels which are cut off. That’s because in the last versions of Premium if the “Label Size” in the “Properties” of a field was less that the actual label length older versions of Premium would still display the whole label so long as an adjacent field did not overlap it. Now, in PE 9. the view respects the layout length. The result is some of your existing field labels maybe be cropped. The fix is simple, albeit a little time consuming. Just edit the properties and adjust the length of the Label.
2. The stock “Dashboards” that come with PE are based on assumptions of where you’ve stored certain data, such as the Account Manager, the Source, etc. Since many firms have modified their fields and stored data differently, the stock dashboards may appear to be functioning improperly. In fact they are functioning the way they were designed. So, the answer is that you may need to edit or even redo several of the dashboards. Going into the designer is NOT something “users” should do without the necessary knowledge and experience, nor may most non-master rights users even have the permission rights to do so. By the same token, this represents a very good chance for the GoldMine Administrator to get practical experience. I suggest you clone (copy) any dashboard before you do any editing to play it safe and maintain an original to go back to.
3. You can not edit the contact associated with an existing scheduled activity. I believe this must be a bug. But at this time, if you schedule an activity with a Primary contact and you want to change it to one of the additional contacts you have to pretty much have to kill the activity and do it over again.
4. In the old “Outlook Link” (aka. GISMO) one could “Link All Emails from a Sender” at once to the respective GoldMine Record. That feature appears to be lost/dropped in the new GoldMine Integration. Please give it back!
5. There’s quite a few issues with the new Microsoft Outlook integration. I’m not going to list them all, nor do I even know them all. FrontRange is giving us the impression when we call about a problem that they’re aware of it so it’s our sense that FRS is dealing with it and is going to have to put some things back to development. There is an update to address the OL integration in a “Hot Fix.” You have to request this from GoldMine customer care, it is not on “net-update” and it is not included in the current general release! We’ve applied the “hot fix” and it does address some performance issues, but I believe FrontRange is working on further improvements that should come out in a general update in the relatively near future.)
Some may have fixes you can apply now, for example:
- Some have had a problem with linking emails. Turns out the solution to search the user’s Windows\System32 folder for the “gm7s32.dll” file and delete it. We did that and now it’s linking emails properly.
- I was getting a “Data Error” when I opened my calendar that was synced over from my GoldMine calendar. The problem turned out to have to do with a data conversion of sales forecast dollar amounts in order to display them in Outlook. Easy work around (for now) – just go into the Link Set-up turn off the “option” to display “forecasted sales” on the calendar pane.
6. In Case Management the look-up list we had for the “Offering” field was lost with the upgrade. Not a big deal … just retyped the choices.
7. You may already know upgrading to GMPE v9 requires a re-licensing of the product. But be aware not only will your GoldMine server need a new GoldMine license issued, but any synchronizing remotes would also need new undocked licenses. The new license for your main server is issued to you automatically during the NetUpdate process. We have found some case where the new licenses generated for remotes didn’t “stick” and had to be re-entered several times until they finally “took.” We have a case where a remote is consistently getting transfer set retrieval errors after upgrading to GMPE v9.
NOTE: Trying to update using NetUpdate – click here for a word about that!
(While you’re considering the negatives don’t overlook the positives! Click the link here to see what I LIKE too.)
8. Little Peeves – I’m going to start to list in this paragraph trivia issues that are nuisances or maybe bad design/programming, but not necessarily bugs: a) To close the windows/tabs you practically need to be a surgeon to click on the “x” – come on FRS let’s make the target a bit more forgiving. b) Don’t display the “Actual Close Date” when creating a new opportunity. It’s confusing to users!
What’s your experience? This post is a work in progress. More to come …
Here’s a list of helpful documentation that is handy for you:
GoldMine 9.0 API Integration Guide
GoldMine 9.0 Administrators Guide
GoldMine 9.0 Compatability Matrix
Would you like First Direct’s assistance? Call us at 845-221-3800 or email info@1stdirect.com
