20 Years with GoldMine

Here's a repost of an article found on a US GoldMine Admin Blog.  The author is Terry Porter of Plustar Inc (www.plustar.com) and summarises her benefits from using GoldMine over those years from version 3 onwards.  Very interesting post and resonates with many of our customers who have been using GoldMine since version 2.

"This month my company celebrated 20 years of using Goldmine! We're a small Industrial B2B operation in Dallas, TX. I was a new employee when their CRM initiative started and they picked Goldmine. I just celebrated my 20th anniversary with them in August.

The version 3.2 Goldmine software was purchased in late 1996, and with the help of a Goldmine Solutions Partner a "Go Live" date was set of 12/17/1996. This rollout was supported by the Owner, who felt Goldmine could help Sales people to document their activities. And he was right!

We began by transferring a lot of information from our ERP system. I remember hearing from those involved that the mapping progress with that ERP software was not easy. But it worked, and soon Sales people were using Goldmine. It branched out from there, and pretty much everyone at Plustar touches Goldmine now. We still do weekly imports from this legacy ERP into Goldmine today, using Goldbox.

Of the 20,000+ records in our Goldmine database, 2,037 date from 12/17/1996 still! That's longevity!

In early 1997, the Goldmine Administrator who had been responsible for the project from the beginning left. I had been trained on Goldmine as a "PC person", but I was employed as an Administrative Assistant to the Owners. I had not yet taken on the role of Network Administrator and later Systems Administrator. But I was asked to take over running Goldmine.

Our first company wide email rollout was in Goldmine. We've used nothing but the Goldmine email client ever since.

From the early days, I remember struggling with Goldmine BLOB database errors. Goldmine did get that issue under control in later versions. We upgraded to Goldmine 4, then Goldmine 5 & eventually Goldmine 6. Along the way, I learned a lot about database administration in general and Goldmine in particular.

In 2009, we made the big leap from Goldmine 6.7 dbase to Goldmine 9 SQL. In 2016, we installed Goldmine Web.

I need to say a word about Goldmine Tech Support here, they have been outstanding since Day 1, and have helped me through so many problems.

Another resource to help me as a Goldmine Administrator has been the Goldmine Communities. Forums set up so users could help each other. Some of these were unofficial, and some were run by Goldmine itself. And Goldmine's own KnowledgeBase was helpful too. I attended seminars and webinars to expand my Goldmine knowledge.

So here we are, 20 years later! I think it is a testament to the Goldmine Software that it is such an intrinsic part of how we do business. "Is that information in Goldmine?" is a question employees ask when talking about customers, prospects and suppliers. The idea that you document activities in Goldmine has been reinforced from the top down for all of these years. It's now part of our DNA, we onboard new employees to use it too from Day 1. Thank you, Goldmine!"