ProUnison Ltd Business Blog

Controlling GoldMine by using the API – an example

Kevin Farnan — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:53:58 +0000

GoldMine’s API provides a marvellously powerful way to customise almost every aspect of the system. For most configuration requirements the API is not necessary given that there are so many ways to tailor GoldMine through the normal user interface. Adding fields, screen layout changes, adding custom screens as well as controlling view/update access at field and record level ... all this is done through the standard configuration tools.

It is when you want to go beyond those controls that the API becomes invaluable. With the API User access to almost any dialog can be monitored as well as the selections in these dialogs. In addition, based on user setting or actions you can enable and disable onscreen options, change record values and do much more.

A very simple example that we completed recently had to do with the automatic logging of a history record when a document template is merged to a contact as you can see is the sample history tab below. This shows that the document template ‘Appt Letter to Parents’ was merged by the user John Browne for the particular contact in GoldMine.

However this function can be switched off in Document Template Properties using the ‘Save to History’ tick box as seen here:

Once this option is un-ticked there will be no automatic history record of the document being merged. This can be a good option to have in some circumstances, however, we had a client that wanted to block access to this for all users on all templates.

So the API came to the rescue here simply by monitoring the display of the specific dialog and disabling the option when displayed. The dialog now displays as shown below:

This is almost a trivial example of what can be achieved with the GoldMine API but it points to the power available. Remember that almost any data in GoldMine can be used to control what happens on this dialog and others. For example the User Group memberships of the currently logged in GoldMine user could be checked first so that only if they were a member of a designated group would they have the option enabled. We could also, for example, log in history the fact that they changed the option for a particular document template.

As mentioned earlier GoldMine has in-depth customizability without the API but in those circumstances where you have a particular, perhaps unusual, requirement specific to your business, the API adds a further deeper level of flexibility.

Easy Reporting from GoldMine CRM or other Database Systems

Denis Vaughan — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:24:40 +0000

One of the challenges facing companies who implement CRM systems or who have in-house designed database systems, is the ability to be able to easily create effective reports without incurring ongoing development costs.

The best applications to help solve this issue is Stonefield Query. In development for over twenty years, the Stonefield Query application comes with a collection of standard reports for your GoldMine CRM system and if you use QuoteWerks there are reports also available.

The beauty of Stonefield's approach is that they have created a dictionary that details the GoldMine database Structure, including table links, (and QuoteWerks), so the end user simply has to choose the fields they want in the report and the design is managed by the application. Advanced users can then modify the layout and add additional calculations if necessary. There is also the facility to create Cross Tab, Label, Chart and dashboard reports.

In addition to using Stonefield Query with your GoldMine and QuoteWerks, we can also develop a version that will work with other databases. So if you have an in-house developed database system and we can connect using ODBC or other direct methods, we can create a Stonefield Query version that will allow you report against your own system.

Make reporting easier with wizard driven professional looking reports using Stonefield Query.

Mobilise your CRM in 2012 with GoldMine Mobile 9.0

Donncha O'Neill — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:01:21 +0000

GoldMine Mobile Edition 9.0.

Mobile users are able to access their critical customer and contact information, forecasted sales, case details, and daily calendaring activities even while they are disconnected from the office environment. The easy-to-use and easy-to-install mobile application allows mobile agents to continue their customer engagement efforts to help drive better customer relationships and increase customer satisfaction.

GoldMine Mobile Edition 9.0 is compatible with GoldMine Premium Edition 9.0.3, and runs on the Apple iOS mobile device platform (iPhone & iPad).

Features and Functionality:

Real-time access anywhere - GoldMine Mobile Edition 9.0 allows instant, wireless access to mobile users using the widely popular Apple iOS mobile device platform.
Rich user interface – GoldMine Mobile Edition 9.0 user interface is designed with the look and feel of a native smartphone application. This UI makes the application easier to learn and use by the mobile users and supports standard touchscreen gestures.
Log contacts and track activities – Attach time-stamped notes of phone conversations, meetings and ideas, as well as view histories and activities for any contact.
Manage revenue-related activities – Help manage and identify forecasted sales, increase sales productivity and drive additional revenue through available mobile sales functionality.
Perform service engagements – Provide service technicians and other field service workers with instant access to customer, case and service activities for them to perform their field based problem to resolution processes.
Manage mobile activities – See all of your calls, meetings, and to-do entries in the activities list available on the mobile device. In real time, update the activity record and associated CRM data so no information is lost and all teams are kept up to date on any activity performed in the field. SMS reminders ensure no activity is missed while you're on the road.

Go Mobile in 2012 - find out the full potential of GoldMine Mobile 9 by contacting us to discuss further.

Download a PDF Brochure for GoldMine Mobile 9 here.

Jumping into the Cloud!

Kevin Farnan — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:04:56 +0000

Jumping into the Cloud!

Guess I have to admit that I am a cautious individual by nature. Given this, and the current predominance of positive views on Cloud Computing, I hope I can be forgiven for only giving reasons for caution here... just negatives, no positives! At worst I would hope to rebalance the discussion a bit!

So my question is: if I was evaluating the option of a cloud based system to manage my client/customer information what risks should I address? Here’s what I came up with:

Connectivity – access to your the system and data is 100% dependent on internet connectivity. In our experience here in Ireland broadband outages do occur with the major suppliers from time to time – there are recent examples in January 2012 and December 2011 affecting 22,000 and 10,000 broadband users respectively: http://pressroom.eircom.net/press_releases/article/eircom_Outage/ http://pressroom.eircom.net/press_releases/article/eircom_Outage_in_Kerry/

It is important to establish what loss of access to data can be tolerated by your organisation, staff and clients.

Depending on where your cloud service is based, and what data services they use, connectivity issues can be global rather than local. The high profile outages of Amazon cloud services last year are interesting examples, see discussion at: http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/04/lessons-from-a-cloud-failure-its-not-amazon-its-you/ and http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment.html

Data Protection- the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland requires that you “establish precisely where and how the data you provide to a cloud provider will be handled” (http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewdoc.asp?m=&fn=/documents/FAQ. Will you know where your data is stored and where it may be backed up to? Is it visible to cloud supplier personnel - as is the case currently with the popular http://www.dropbox.com/ service see http://www.dropbox.com/privacy#security: "we have a small number of employees who must be able to access user data"?

Data Security – this can be an issue and remains the responsibility of the organisation owning the data. Some useful considerations are raised in the document ‘Cloud Computing Legal Considerations for Data Controllers’ at http://www.dilloneustace.ie/publications/Regulatory-and-Compliance and a European perspective at http://www.iiea.com/events/fleischer-hawkes-regulating-for-the-cloud

Data Consent must be explicitly obtained from clients for processing of their data and it may be necessary to provide information on how this data will be processed (see Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 A Guide For Data Controllers at http://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/a_guide_for_data_contollers/696.htm )

Service Continuity - The continuing availability of a cloud based application over the medium to long term can be an issue. There are recent examples of high profile cloud based systems being discontinued at relatively short notice e.g. ‘Google Health’ closing down after 3 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Health or DabbleDB on online database system taken over by Twitter and discontinued: http://blog.dabbledb.com/2011/03/an-important-announcement.html .

Is your data safe in such circumstances and what is involved in moving to a new system? There is a good discussion of such an experience here http://cemerick.com/2011/05/12/recovering-from-and-avoiding-cloud-service-lock-in/ and outline of some of the issues here: http://blog.alphasoftware.com/2011/04/problem-with-quickbase-caspio-zoho-and.html

Licensing Costs – for Cloud systems this is generally on a subscription by named user basis. Any person that requires use of the system, however intermittently, will usually require a licence and subscription. By comparison GoldMine Premium Edition uses concurrent licensing so you base your license count on the number of simultaneous system users you expect.

Lifetime Costs - While costs are spread over time in the cloud subscription model it is important to compare system lifetime costs, or at least costs over the first five years, to assess relative costs of systems. This is illustrated at http://www.moreproductive.com/goldmine-vs-cloud-crm-goldmine-wins-in-the-long-run/ . Remember too that costs for installed systems, such as GoldMine Premium Edition, usually include specific customisation to suit your needs, training to ensure you get the best from your system as well as ongoing individualised support services. Unless the required system is relatively simple it is important to recognise that cloud solutions also require services for system setup, training and support.

IT Infrastructure – you still need an IT Infrastructure to access cloud based systems and this needs to be properly secured and maintained.

Payment Policies - It is important to check service discontinuation policies in case of subscription payment delay. Access to data may be blocked and some contracts state that data will be deleted if not accessed for a period of months.

Change Control - cloud based systems may be subject to software changes or functionality without your permission.

As I said from the start this blog is not intended to be an evaluation of the positives and negatives of cloud versus localised systems. However when we take responsibility for our client/customer information, how it is stored and managed, I think being fully aware of the possible risks and issues has got to come first.

Kevin

Managing Quotes for your Company with QuoteWerks

Denis Vaughan — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:11:51 +0000

When we are working on sites with GoldMine implementations, it is often the case that we will review the way sales personnel issue quotes to clients. Sometimes this process can be quite structured, but many times it can be the case that individual sales people have found the need to develop their own way of quoting and recording quotes, as no set system or process had been defined to support them.

Over a period of time this will work for the individual and a good sales person will be able to manage their prospects, quotes and sales using a combination of Word and Excel. Difficulties do arise, however, when we look at an organisation that both wants and needs to be able to review, at any stage, what is the level and value of quotes currently issued across all areas within the sales function, and at what stage of completion these quotes are. It is quite normal for weekly meetings to be held to determine this information but this has the potential to delay an action that might result in a quicker completion of some of the active quotes.

The easiest solution is to have a centralised system of recording these quotes and sales activities. The GoldMine application allows for an organisation to monitor sales pipelines across their sales personnel, but on it’s own does not cater for the issue of quotes. One of the best solutions for this is QuoteWerks.

QuoteWerks enables companies to create detailed quotes and proposals with speed and efficiency, and allow powerful reporting tools to assist the quote management function. Whilst it integrates directly with GoldMine using the contact list and creating / updating the sales forecasts, it is not required and is a very powerful stand alone application, which could later be integrated with GoldMine should an effective CRM solution be desired.

The QuoteWerks interface is simple to use and in a very short space of time a company can be managing quotes across all sales personnel in one central system. It also allows for standardised consistent presentations for quotes and proposals, something that the use of Word and Excel often results in being lost. For those still happy using Word for their quote layouts, QuoteWerks also can merge to a Word template and save a PDF version linked back to the Quote giving the best of both worlds.

Please contact us if you would like to get more information about QuoteWerks or to see the application. There are two short videos on our video tips page to show the use of QuoteWerks using standard Product Bundle and Product Configuration Building quotes.

We are happy to be able to announce that there is a special Christmas 2011 discount of 10% on QuoteWerks licenses for all versions until December 16^th.

Please contact us if you want to discuss the special offer. Installation and training can be done at a later stage.

SurveyHelper (©ProUnison Ltd. 2011)

Donncha O'Neill — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:07:28 +0000

SurveyHelper (©ProUnison Ltd. 2011)

SurveyHelper is a custom application for GoldMine Premium Edition that we developed for a client of ours, to allow them to batch import large volumes of survey data completed by their staff in Excel spreadsheets.

These Excel spreadsheets, contain a list of questions a choice of three answers per question, and the answer selected. All this information needed to be captured on a matching GoldMine record for later reporting and statistical analysis.

We took the original Excel spreadsheet, and created a GoldMine Template from it, so that each Survey file could be merged directly from GoldMine with the correct unique identifier for the GoldMine contact record plus additional fields of information populated automatically in the spreadsheet.

SurveyHelper takes each Excel Survey, validates that all the questions have been answered and that there are no errors in the file.
It then imports all the questions, the choice of answers, and the chosen answer by creating GoldMine Detail Records against the relevant Contact record in GoldMine.

GoldMine displays these survey question Detail Records for each Contact under a custom Survey tab that staff can filter or group on using GoldMine's built in options.

Using Crystal Reports, the surveys can be listed for individual users or graphed and summarised across the entire database for statistical analysis.

If you have data you need your staff to be able to import into GoldMine easily, then please contact us to discuss what possibilities there are for your system.

If you would like to view a short video of SurveyHelper Click Here

Thank you.

The ProUnison Team.

MergeCoder - a free enhancement for GoldMine

Kevin Farnan — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:30:05 +0000

MergeCoder (©ProUnison Ltd. 2011)

MergeCoder is a small application we have created to make it easier to manage document mergecodes for additional contacts in GoldMine. Within GoldMine these mergecodes are very useful for managing which additional contacts particular documents, or emails, are merged to. However, there is no direct way in GoldMine to view all the mergecodes in one place – you must open each additional contact individually to check their mergecodes.

MergeCoder overcomes this issue by allowing you to view all additional contacts with their merge codes in a list. You can filter this list by particular mergecodes and jump to any record in GoldMine simply by clicking on a contact in MergeCoder. You can also copy the mergecodes list to the clipboard or any suitable application.

This application is provided free of charge and can be downloaded here. It has been tested with GoldMine Premium Edition versions 8 and 9. It does not work with earlier versions of GoldMine currently.

To view a video demonstrating MergeCoder in action, please click here.

Why not give it a try? If you have any suggestions for improvements we would be happy to hear them.

Completing recurring activities in GoldMine – API enhancement to do it our way!

Kevin Farnan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:24:21 +0000

Just completing a nice enhancement for one of our GoldMine Customers. GoldMine has really powerful features for scheduling recurring activities: daily, weekly, monthly ... or even the second Tuesday of every month if you like and more! One of our Customers makes extensive use of this functionality scheduling multiple activities across multiple contacts and employees. This is a big productivity bonus as multiple activities can not only be scheduled in one action but also logged in one action – that is marked as completed or cancelled for example.

However there was a glitch:

When completing some recurring activities GoldMine Premium Edition 8 can move these from the date they were scheduled for, to the current date if completing as a group. So it looks like all your activities occurred one day! Our Customer wanted the activities to be left on the day they were scheduled for.

To get over this we developed a small enhancement using the GoldMine API. This enhancement switches off GoldMine’s screen for completing multiple activities and displays instead our own version of the screen as shown below:

When the user clicks ‘Complete All Activities’ they are all completed as normal in GoldMine but remain in the day they were scheduled for. We also added the activity count – ‘Total count of activities to be completed:’ that updates based on which of the options the user clicks.

The GoldMine API offers a marvellously powerful way to adapt and enhance GoldMine to specific Customer needs

Kevin

GoldMine Premium Edition 9.0.2 Released

Donncha O'Neill — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:38:00 +0000

The GoldMine product team has announced the release of GoldMine Premium Edition 9.0.2.

As with all GMPE service packs, the biggest driver for GMPE 9.0.2 is product quality. This release contains over 50 fixed issues for improved product stability, quality and additional Microsoft platform support, including Microsoft Windows 7 SP1and Windows Internet Explorer 9.

For a complete list of the added Microsoft technology supported platforms, fixes and improvements please refer to the GMPE 9.0.2 release notes below.

If you have any questions regarding this release or anything GoldMine related please contact us.

Quick Links to your Free WebTexts.

Donncha O'Neill — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:38:00 +0000

This is something we set-up for a client a few years ago, but its proved useful to us and to other clients, we hope some of you may like it too.

We all have our Mobile contracts or even Pre-Pay accounts with hundreds of free Webtexts just sitting there waiting to be used up. So why not make it easier and quicker for you or your staff to fire off Text messages to your clients or colleagues with a single short-cut that can take you directly to the 'Compose New Message' window.

You might think a short-cut to this a bit frivolous, 'Surely I can just bookmark my provider's homepage'. But add up the amount of time you spend loading their home page full of Flash animations, finding the login option (even if it does remember your user-name) and after clicking through a few links you get the new message page up on screen, now do that 20 more times during the course of the next hour, sick of it yet? Or, do you have multiple numbers that you would like to text from? Instantly login to any one of them through a single short-cut or Bookmark.

For a short-cut on your Desktop, right mouse click on the desktop, select New and Shortcut... In your browser, add a new Favorite or Bookmark. Copy & Paste the sample Vodafone Link shown below into the field for the Short-cut or Path or Address.
(If you want to know more about adding Bookmarks/Favorites: click the following links: Chrome Internet Explorer, FireFox ).

https://www.vodafone.ie/myv/services/login/Login.shtml?username=0871234567&password=abcd&redirect=/myv/messaging/webtext/index.jsp

Change the number 0871234567 to your mobile number, and abcd to your password.

If you have more than one account, create a second short-cut/Bookmark, paste in the link and modify it for the next phone number and password. Be sure to label it.

Now when you want to quickly send a message out to clients/colleagues using your Free Webtexts, just click whichever short-cut you want to use, the Compose Text message window will be displayed without any prompting, clicking or logging in. If you are using multiple numbers switching between accounts is as easy as clicking the other short-cut.

Just remember, your Login password is visible in the short-cut for anyone to see if they edit the link. But it's better than a sticky note on the side of the monitor for all to see.

Vodafone Ireland Example:
https://www.vodafone.ie/myv/services/login/Login.shtml?username=0871234567&password=abcd&redirect=/myv/messaging/webtext/index.jsp

Vodafone Ireland All@Once Example:
https://www.vodafone.ie/myv/services/login/Login.shtml?username=0871234567&password=abcd&redirect=/myv/messaging/vfallatonce/web/index.jsp

Three Ireland Example:
http://webtext.three.ie/processLogin.jsp?mobile=0831234567 &pin=1234 &serviceId=19088 &origincountryprefex=353

The 3 Logo is Copyright to 3 Ireland.
Vodafone and the Vodafone Logo are Copyright to Vodafone Ireland.