The Insider Blog

Because MasterMine is a hands-on tool for managing and organizing GoldMine data, it offers many ways to group, and slice and dice records within reports.  One of these is “Group on Search”, a powerful way to search through hundreds or thousands of field values to bring together only those records with a field whose items “contain” certain values.

A simple example is the common case where we want to segment our database by contact title.  All executives (president, CEO, COO, CFO etc.) are to go in one group.  All other managers in another group.  All other titles in a third group.  We can use the search function to pull together each of these groups in a few seconds.  Now we can market as appropriate to each level of prospect.

We see many situations (such as the “Source” field in GoldMine) where users have accumulated far too many possible values to meaningfully sort through them.  Use the search concept to group your records by source field value, pulling all similar entries together into a single group.  Now you’ve suddenly taken a “junk-drawer” field and turned it into a useful segmenting tool for GoldMine.

You can see an example of “Group on Search” in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Let us know how we can offer you better information, tips, and tricks for using MasterMine.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of every other week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

There have been some great deals offered by FrontRange lately on GoldMine software upgrades.  We get a lot of questions from users anticipating such an upgrade, wondering how this will affect their MasterMine installation.  Here are a few notes:

1.    License costs:  It costs you nothing to get compatible MasterMine licenses to match your new GoldMine license IF you are current on your MasterMine annual maintenance.  This is true even if you upgrade from a very old version of GoldMine wth  dBase on the back end.  We simply generate and send you a new license number to match your new GoldMine serial number. You will generally need a new MasterMine license number to match your new GoldMine serial number.  Maintenance also covers any MasterMine upgrades you might need.

If you are not current on maintenance, you can reinstate maintenance or upgrade your MasterMine at less than full retail cost.  The amount is determined by how long you have been off of maintenance and how many version releases there have been in the meantime.  Contact us for pricing in advance of your upgrade.

2.    Report Upgrades:  Your existing reports may continue to work just fine for you without intervention, if you upgrade from one SQL-based GoldMine version to another.

If upgrading from SQL to SQL, make sure the new database has the same server name, database name, and login credentials as the old database. This will prevent you from having to update each report.

If your reports contain Notes, whether from the main contact record, pending, history, or opportunities, you may need to rebuild these reports, or at least have them corrected by a MasterMine technician.

Finally, if upgrading from dBase GoldMine to a SQL version of GoldMine (the old “Standard” version to any currently available version) your reports will all need to be rebuilt from scratch or updated by MasterMine technicians online to replace the back end query with SQL syntax. In most cases, this is fairly simple for us to do IF you keep a backup of your old dBase tables available during the conversion process.

3.    Training: When you upgrade, use the opportunity to retrain yourself or other users on MasterMine.  Online training can include as many attendees as you want, for one price.  See http://www.mastermine.net/users-training.php  for our full training curriculum.

4.    Data Cleanup:  We highly recommend cleaning up your database BEFORE you upgrade to the new version.  This means “normalizing” your data, making sure all records conform to your data entry rules, as well as eliminating “junk data” that you won’t be needing in the new system.  MMUpdater is by far your most efficient means of doing this.  Do it yourself, or we can help you online at very reasonable cost.

5.    GoldMine Customization: Chances are your upgrade of GoldMine also entails some improvements in your workflow and possibly some new decisions about coding, lookups, and general usage.  We can advise you on changes that will help you with reporting and activity tracking.

For all these issues we strongly recommend that you contact us well in advance of upgrading GoldMine – or even if you are considering a move away from GoldMine itself.  We’ve seen it all, and we’re happy to share our experience.