If you are one of those organizations who enters a lot of information into GoldMines Notes Tab, then this post is for you.
NOTE: This is only true of GoldMine Standard Edition & Corporate Edition. GoldMine Premium Edition now stores Notes in a database table and each note is a separate entry in the table.
Here are some things to be aware of if you are one of those businesses that are over-using the Notes tab in GoldMine.
THE PROBLEMS:
1) NOTES Character Limitation
After about 65,000 characters (or about 8 pages) information will simply start to disappear. In some cases I have even seen where the notes from one contact are incorrectly linked to another contact, due to data corruption, or even worse, ALL NOTES ARE LOST FOR ALL CONTACTS due to data corruption.
2) Notes Don’t Sync Well
Only notes inserted via Contact | Insert a Note will sync, because they are time/date stamped. But changes to that note, or any notes not added using that method will not sync, because they are not time/date stamped.
3) No Security.
Anyone with access to the Notes Tab can go in and delete everything in there. So if you are storing all your important information in the Notes Tab, the potential for data loss is great.
4) No Analysis.
If you want to find out how many calls, appointments, or actions were completed by date or completed by GoldMine user then you are out of luck with the Notes tab. GoldMine does not have a way of analyzing this data, because of how it is stored in the system.
THE SOLUTION:
Use the Schedule & Complete menu options to schedule activities and then complete them, this will put them into the Pending and History Tabs in GoldMine. This will allow you to keep a nice record of who did what and when. You can even store Notes into these scheduled/completed activities. You can even setup short cut macros in the Tollbar/Taskbar to make this as easy as a single click.
NOTE: If you’re using the Notes Tab in GoldMine, and have used the Contact | Insert a Note menu option to create your notes, which creates a date/time stamp, you can use a GoldMine add-on called GoldBox to convert all your Notes to completed history, based on those Date/Time Stamps. If you didn’t use the Contact | Insert a Note then you are out of luck.
WHAT IS THE NOTES TAB GOOD FOR?
With all this said you’re probably wondering what is the NOTES tab good for? The Notes tab is great for jotting down or making “NOTE” of something such as directions, comments about the contact. You might also use it for keeping track of personal information such as contacts favorite restaurant, names of kids, or any information you feel might help you with managing your relationship better with this contact. Maybe your contact has a hard to pronounce name, so rather then offend them the next time you call, you can write down in the Notes tab the proper pronunciation of their name.
SEARCHING THE NOTES WITH A SQL QUERY
One last thing about the Notes Tab. If you are on GoldMine Corporate or Premium Edition you can use a SQL Query to search the NOTES for specific terms. Simply copy the following SQL Query into your GoldMine SQL Query pane and where it says ENTER YOUR SEARCH TERM HERE, replace that with the word(s) you want to search for (be sure to leave the % signs).
SELECT c1.company, c1.contact, c1.Phone1, c1.key1 as “Record Type”, notes.createddate as “Date Created”, notes.userid as “User”, notes.note as “NOTES”, c1.accountno as “GOLDMINE ACCOUNTNO”
FROM contact1 c1
INNER JOIN notes
ON c1.accountno = notes.accountno
WHERE notes.rectype = ‘c1’
AND CAST(CAST(notes.note AS VARBINARY) AS VARCHAR(8000)) LIKE ‘%ENTER YOUR SEARCH TERM HERE%’
ORDER BY notes.userid, createddate
