One of the things we recommend to all our GoldMine Database Administrators, is that as the end of the year rolls around you want to ensure you do a good GoldMine database clean-up. What does this database clean-up include, you might be asking. Well it includes a number of things so I’ll list a few of them below and if you need assistance with any of them please contact First Direct Corp for technical assistance at (800) 935-4386. As always before performing any of the following, please ensure you have a SQL Database Backup of your GoldMine database and a backup of your GoldMine installation folder on the server.
- Clean up your users pending items.
As the year is coming to an end, now is a good time to go back through your users Activity List of pending Call, Appts, etc. and ensure they are all caught up and anything that is outstanding/old is completed, deleted or maybe even updated. I’ve seen a number of users who’s Activity List/Calendar is full of old scheduled items from many years back. The Activity Lists pending items should only be showing items (Calls, Appts, Next Actions, etc) in GoldMine that are still needing to be completed or performed. - Clean up your Mailbox database table/Emails.
If you do a lot of emailing through GoldMine, over the years your Mailbox database table can easily grow to be many many Gigs, for some clients this is not an issue, because their server/environment can handle that size database. For others, it can really start to slow down their server and of course their GoldMine performance. What we recommend is holding on to only that last 10 years worth of emails. So now is a good time to go into the GoldMine database and remove the emails from over 10 years ago. This can be done in a number of ways, and First Direct Corp. can assist you with performing a bulk deletion. - Remove/Clean-up old Users.
Employess come and go and so should their user accounts in GoldMine. Do you have users in GoldMine that no longer work at your Organization? Now is a good time to go in and clean up their User accounts, ie clean up their emails and pending items, and delete their user accounts. Deleting a User account, wont delete any of that users Completed/History items, but it will remove their Pending Items, which is why you should ensure you deal with their Pendings Items first. - Clean up the Mailbox/Attach directory.
When you receive an email in GoldMine with an email attachment, all the email attachments are placed in a folder in the GoldMine installation directory on the server called Mailbox and then a sub folder called Attach. Now some customers have their GoldMine setup to further organize/store their email attachments by receiving user and year and month. We do recommend this approach as well, because it can make the following task a littler easier to manage. One of the things that people do is they incorrectly attach their Logos, and Facebook and Twitter icons to their emails, so every time they email you, you are forced to save/download a copy of their logo and/or Facebook icon, Twitter icon. Over time the Mailbox\Attach folder can really get cluttered with these types of files. Of course the larger that folder gets with images/attachments, the slower GoldMine will be to read/write to it. So cleaning up this folder and removing all those annoying Logo’s and Facebook icons/Twitter icons can really help with your GoldMine performance, not too mention the amount of valuable disk space it will free up. - Purge Logs
GoldMine has a logging system for keeping track of who did what and when in GoldMine. These logs are used for synchronization between remote GoldMine systems. If you don’t have any remote users, then you should be purging these logs once a month or so. I can tell you from my 20+ years experience, very few people remember to do it. So now is a good time to perform a Purge of your GoldMine logs.
