API to GoldMine CRM/SAF System?

saulgood asks: "My company has made an investment in GoldMine, a customer management and sales automation software package. It seems to have some really cool features and sound business ideas underpining it, but the interface is lacking and, of course, only runs on Windows. I would like to find/build a simple interface to pine/elm for the tech department folks who don't need all the features, just mail and maybe the calendar. Has anyone tried such a thing? I believe it has a vCal interface, and the DB can either be SQL Server or Borland so connecting to the DB should be easy enough."

It's just a database.

[NetJunkie]

We're about to start using it here. It's just a database with a frontend. Figure out the database structure and write anything you want. I believe the "small" version may be Borland DB but the big client/server version is SQL.

Good luck...

[pease1]

We used GM at a past company I worked at. The execs and sales guys loved it, all the techies hated it.

We had a consultant who was pretty knowledgable about the internals of GM and he had moved us to the version that supported SQLserver, so we looked into building a simple front end. The consultant had a really hard time getting information about the structure of the DB and it was clear there were some really weird things happening between the client and the DB... the more we looked the more we realized there were dependies between fields that weren't in the DB, but managed by the client.

We gave up and just used email. A really great example of why closed systems suck.

Good luck!

Re:Good luck...

[KurdtX]

Same here

I haven't really dealt with GoldMine myself, but apparently we just like acquiring really fancy but utterly propetary software here, as we have three customer databases, each updated by a different department which is only responsible for keeping their database up to date. I heard several people before me have attempted to create a linking, but they don't want "bad data" from one database "infecting" the others, so no department will let you play with their database.

But then again, our IS department still swears by MS, even though they have to put all of their work on hold for a few weeks every time a new Outlook bug shows up. Someone get me outta here!

GoldMine Everywhere

[qurob]

You need a web server, and you can run GoldMine Everywhere.

http://www.frontrange.com/goldmine/fo2000_gmes.a sp

You can then use PalmPilots, or a web browser to access your customer data ANYWHERE.

API

[afriedel]

I used to be a consultant in Goldmine. Goldmine has some serious drawbacks when you start trying to customize it. Dont get me wrong, it's an excellent piece of software for what it is intended to do, but a lot of things have been added to the software and they have tried to keep backwards compatibility between versions.

Some problems you may encounter is generating a "RECID". Goldmine has a proprietary way to generate unique identifiers for db records. Last time I knew the only way to do it was through their COM API or they have some SQL Server Stored Procedures that can do it as well.

Also, the DB structure is not exactly straightforward. Fields mean different things depending on what type of record it is. Address1 could mean "PC Type". The only way to know is to look at the documentation.

GM has some documentation on this stuff. Check their FTP site.

More GM Support links

[FusionJunky]

I work at FrontRange in their web dept. You may also want to check out http://support.frontrange.com which should have much of the information you'll want. Also the documentation is rather extensive, I write middleware web->GoldMine stuff all the time, I might be able to help you a little.

COM interface

[AndroidCat]

Pretty much all CRMs have a COM interface, so you might look into that.

We use it, it's ok, but watch how big it gets

[metalgeek]

We use it where I work at an isp for our customer contasct, all calls and email contact with client gets recorded in it.
worked ok for a while, but with 70-80 exmployees in it with around 300,000-400,000 contacts it's starts crapping out on you, even if you upgrade the hardware.
As well, there tech support is only so so.
For some of our issues, they told us to upgrade to newest version, so we asked them if the issue was fixed in it.
nope they said.
otherwise thogugh, it is not bad contact management software.
just make sure your not to big:)

Just took a look

[NutscrapeSucks]

I've just finished a project where we interfaced with the MS-SQL version of GoldMine to get customer records.

From what I can tell, there is a COM API but it's not really stable or fully intended for 3rd party developers. We decided to avoid a maintenance nightmare and not use it, and instead read the data out of the SQL tables.

Even though the thing is on MS-SQL, the database is pure flat file -- it looks exactly like the DBase tables I was looking at for similar sales tools 10 years ago. Given that it uses something called "BDE" (Borland Data Engine?), that's probably exactly what it is.

After that it was read-only access was straight forward -- just figure out the user-defined field mappings and you are there. Really the biggest problem was escaping out their phony primary key which uses every code-unfriendly character you can think of. And the fact that there is no clustered index so lookups are sloow. I haven't needed to add or update records yet - that might be more complex due to the fact that uses another goofy field called RECNO (?) as replication sequence. For that you might need to go to the API or their stored procs.