GoldMine software stores one of your firm’s most valuable assets – information on your prospects, customers and vendors, including your activity and communications with them. Protecting this information should be an important concern that is not overlooked. Risks to your data come from a few directions from accidental misuse on the one side, all the way to intentional theft on the other. While the courts may be one line of recourse after the fact, it just makes sense to take some reasonable precautions to mitigate your risks.
GoldMine security is clearly an area for your in-house GoldMine administrator to manage. They are the ones with the “master rights” needed to make the adjustments to your GoldMine security settings. By the same token, the company management has to be involved, if nothing other than to tell the GoldMine administrator their desire to limit access. While an IT administrator may know a good deal about network security, it’s a pretty good bet that they know much less about the security options in GoldMine.
While each firm has a different level of concern and desire to control or limit access to their GoldMine system, there are common areas for consideration. For good or bad, the security in GoldMine is something you have to “put on,” because otherwise GoldMine is a pretty open system. In other words, if you didn’t take away a right in GoldMine, every user in your GoldMine system can delete or export your entire database of contacts. Pretty scary, right?
Here is a list of areas where security comes into play with GoldMine: (The word “Access” below will mean read and write”)
- Access to the entire database
- Access to individual records
- Access to specific fields
- Access to record “notes” tab
- Access to other users: Calendar, History, Reports, Groups, Filters, Forecasts, Templates, Groups, Filters, Linked documents, Opportunities Projects, Customer Service Cases.
- Ability to output and to export/import data
- Ability to globally replace or delete data
- Right to nearly every menu command
- Real-time view of what everyone in the entire office is doing in GoldMine including user activity logs
As you can see and imagine, many of these functions are not appropriate for most users. While users may know these functions exist, or know better not to mess with them, that doesn’t constitute a strategy for managing the security on one of your most valuable assets.
Security starts with the simple decision to control it better. Then, one must know the options and the pros & cons of the choices you have. Some things are relatively obvious, while others take thoughtful consideration. First Direct can help you with understanding your options and making decisions. Some of these topics are covered in our GoldMine Administrator Training Series.
