NEWS & TECH BLOG
GoldMine not affected by Log4J vulnerability
17/12/2021 – in GoldMine, OS / EnvironmentThe good news for GoldMine users is that Ivanti (the software authors) have confirmed that the product isn’t affected by the latest brouhaha to hit the internet. More details are available here: https://forums.ivanti.com/s/article/CVE-2021-44228-Java-logging-library-log4j-Ivanti-Products-Impact-Mapping
02/09/2021 – in SQL queriesI’ve written about NULLS before, but they still find ways to trip us up. It’s always worth protecting yourself from them in a query as they can drive you mad! Take a simple ‘in/not in’ subquery: select A from tableA where A in (select B from tableB) Lets assume that there is some matching data; […]
Setting the default browser for links in GoldMine
11/03/2021 – in GoldMine, IssuesWhen you click on a link in an email in GoldMine, GoldMine asks Windows to open a browser. Often, Windows will insist on using Internet Explorer even if the default set through Windows Settings is something else. This is solely a Windows related issue. There is no setting within GoldMine which handles this, only a […]
The “My GoldMine” feature – useful at last!
23/09/2020 – in Techniques, UncategorizedThere’s a little-known and little-used corner of GoldMine called “My GoldMine”. When it first appeared, many years ago, I think we all looked at it and wondered what was the point. Basically it lets you do things like look at today’s activities and the like – which of course you could always do with the […]
05/10/2018 – in GoldMine, TechniquesIt’s easy enough to block users from updating a field; there’s a flag on the field’s Security tab for that very purpose. Here’s a trick that lets you be a bit more subtle though: rather than blocking users altogether and making a field read-only, it allows a blank field to be written to but then […]
19/12/2017 – in GoldMine, TechniquesThere were several Windows updates and Office updates on 12th and 13th December 2017. One of the “features” of these was to disable DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) in Word. As this is the method that GoldMine uses to insert data into Word templates then these updates have effectively broken GoldMine Plus for Microsoft Word. Thanks […]
11/12/2017 – in UncategorizedCanonbury Services have received certification as GDPR Practitioners from IBITGQ. IBITGQ themselves conform to ISO 17024 for the provision of qualifications. GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulations) come into force on 25th May 2018. They’re on everyone’s lips at the moment, but very few people seem to know what these new regulations mean or how […]
22/11/2017 – in UncategorizedGDPR is a new set of legal obligations that will affect everyone who holds personal data, and GoldMine users are clearly in that category. It will come into force on 25th May 2018. Canonbury Services will be able to guide you through the legal minefield to come as we are soon to become fully accredited […]
16/11/2017 – in GoldMine, ScriptsA little while ago I wrote about the AutoHotKey scripting environment (https://autohotkey.com) and how it can be really useful for GoldMine. Well, here’s a practical example. One of Goldmine’s oddities is that ctrl-s, rather than meaning “save” as in most programs, is interpreted as “send” when you’re composing an email. This means that a simple […]
05/09/2017 – in GoldMine, ScriptsGoldMine’s own macro capability is fairly limited, and in Premium Edition has a few serious flaws. An incredibly powerful alternative though is a free utility called AutoHotKey (autohotkey.com). AutoHotKey (AHK for short) is a general-purpose Windows scripting tool that can be used for all sorts of useful tricks, and it’s particularly useful for us GoldMine […]
13/04/2017 – in Add-Ons, GoldMineGoldMine’s way of providing social media links is to have fields for the various website addresses and to feed these into the GM+View browser. This is limited in a number of ways: you can only have social media links for primary contacts, and you have to create a new field for each new type of […]
06/02/2017 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesHere’s a SQL query to check for invalid characters in email addresses in GoldMine: select coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref), patindex(‘%[^,a-z,A-Z,0-9,.,_,@,-]%’,rtrim(coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref))) as [Position], substring(rtrim(coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref)),patindex(‘%[^,a-z,A-Z,0-9,.,_,@,-]%’,rtrim(coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref))),1) as [InvalidCharacter], ascii(substring(rtrim(coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref)),patindex(‘%[^,a-z,A-Z,0-9,.,_,@,-]%’,rtrim(coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref))),1)) as [ASCIICode] from contsupp where contact=’e-mail address’ and patindex(‘%[^,a-z,A-Z,0-9,.,_,@,-]%’,rtrim(coalesce(contsupref+address1, contsupref))) >0 This is a variation on Gerhard Weiss’ submission here
01/02/2017 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesSometimes, the internet is a wonderful place! There are some outrageously clever people out there donating their expertise for free. One such is a fellow called Muhammad Imran who has written a stored procedure that can recover deleted records from SQL tables by using the transaction logs. You can find it at https://raresql.com/2011/10/22/how-to-recover-deleted-data-from-sql-sever/. It’s not […]
Use a template when emailing a Knowledge Base article
13/01/2017 – in GoldMine, TechniquesGoldMine lets you email a KB article to the current contact, but it doesn’t officially let you use your preferred email template to do so. However, there is a way of cheating the system and making this happen. What you need to do first is to have your template saved as a text file. This […]
Aggregate SQL queries in GoldMine
01/12/2016 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesThe GoldMine SQL editor is very useful but it doesn’t always behave the way that you might expect. This is because it’s adding something extra, which can be good…or a bit bad, depending on what you’re trying to do. It particularly messes up aggregate queries (sum, maximum etc). Thankfully, there are ways round the problem. […]
24/10/2016 – in Add-Ons, GoldMineAs most users know, GoldMine announces the arrival of new emails by means of a small icon in the Windows notification area. However, this doesn’t tell you anything about the email or emails that have come in – unlike Outlook, which briefly shows the subject and sender. Now I don’t like Outlook being able to […]
09/09/2016 – in GoldMine, SQL queries, StructureSome things are easy to find in the GoldMine database while others are a bit more hidden; distribution lists fall into the latter category, but are simple enough once you know how. They are held in the mailbox table and are identified by the folder name being equal to ‘X-GM-GROUPS’. The RFC822 field holds the […]
GM performance and SQL disk space
19/08/2016 – in GoldMine, IssuesOne of the biggest factors in SQL Server’s performance is the amount of free space on the disk where it is installed. When this gets to 25% or below then speed can drop alarmingly. Many things can affect GoldMine responsiveness (network issues can be a biggie) but, if your GoldMine suddenly becomes a lots slower, […]
05/08/2016 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesMS SQL’s American origins can sometimes take us poor Brits unawares, and no more so than with date formats. If, in GoldMine’s SQL editor, you type: select ondate from conthist order by ondate Then, in the UK at least, you will get dates returned in the format dd/mm/yyyy (eg ’30/1/2016′). This can lead you to […]
21/09/2015 – in GoldMine, Issues, SQL queriesRecently a customer had a problem where GoldSync was randomly not synchronising various items. This can sometimes happen when one or both GoldSync machines is set to the wrong time. In this case, both of them said that they were set correctly when interrogated through the Windows GUI. However, one of them was actually telling […]
08/09/2015 – in GoldMine, TechniquesI’ve been having a look at signatures in templates. The standard GoldMine signature macro in the Word link will allow you to pull in your own signature bitmap but, unlike the other merge fields, this one insists that you do this manually when the letter is created and won’t pull it in automatically. This is […]
08/09/2015 – in GoldMine, SQL queries, StructureGoldMine Alerts are very useful, but how they’re stored is shrouded in mystery. As always though, our job is to shine light into the darkness! The alert definitions are stored in the infocentre (whose table is called ‘infomine’). Each alert has a three-letter code which must be unique and which defines which alert it is. […]
Query records, including history
15/07/2015 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesLet’s say that you want to write a query to return a set of contact records and, for each of them, return the last appointment that you had with them. This is actually a bit harder than it looks. The first part is easy enough, say something like this: select company, contact from contact1 where […]
02/03/2015 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesGoldMine uses two tables to keep track of all the changes to the database, primarily for synchronisation (for more information on the mechanics of the sync process, go to the technical documents section of the GoldMine downloads on this website). They can also be useful for us when we’re tracking down who has done what […]
Contact list with email addresses
28/02/2015 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesIt’s quite a common request to export a list of contacts with their associated email addresses. However, because of the way that GoldMine is structured this is actually harder than it might seem, particularly if you want a single list that contains both the primary and additional contacts. Primary contacts are held in the contact1 […]
Debugging GoldSync connection problems
19/02/2015 – in GoldMine, TechniquesWhen facing connection problems it’s always best to start with a checklist of things that GoldSync needs in order to be happy. Some of these steps are blindingly obvious, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to miss out something simple! Check that: 1. GoldMine is installed on the designated GoldSync server and the […]
Where are counters kept in GoldMine?
16/02/2015 – in GoldMine, SQL queries, StructureCounters can be very useful in GoldMine, and are often invoked from field lookups and from lookup.ini. For instance if, in a field lookup, I put the following code: ~ltrim(str(counter(“ABC”,1))) then, each time the entry is selected, the contents of a counter called ABC will placed into the field and the counter will increment by […]
03/11/2014 – in OS / EnvironmentSQL Server requires that TCP port 1433 be opened in the Windows Firewall. You can do this from the Firewall’s UI but it’s actually much quicker and easier to do it from the command line: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name = SQLPort dir = in protocol = tcp action = allow localport = 1433 […]
06/10/2014 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesMost administrators can find their way around the inside of a GoldMine database without too much trouble and, usually, it’s fairly clear where things live. Sometimes though, and particularly with new features, it can be hard to track down the table and field that holds a particular type of information. What we need is something […]
Top n contacts in each country
26/06/2014 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesOne of our customers asked a very interesting question the other day. They wanted to know the top 5 contacts in each country as measured by the number of incoming emails so that they could send an email to each of them. The answer needs a couple of different elements to make it work: 1. […]
12/06/2014 – in GoldMine, TechniquesSomething that not many people know (and, to be honest, we’ve only just stumbled across it ourselves) is that you can easily add links to files and websites in calendar and history notes and also in the Infocentre. Of course the Infocentre has for years had the ‘paperclip and glasses’ icon which lets you attach […]
Trials and tribulations of SSRS
28/05/2014 – in Reports, SSRSFor a long time we’ve been staunch fans of Crystal Reports but, now that it’s no longer given away with GoldMine, we’ve been taking a look at SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSRS is actually quite nice when you want to see a report on a web page which updates itself at a set interval; […]
07/03/2014 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesIf you do a lot of importing into GoldMine you might want to keep track of who imported what and when. Here is what you would think would be a simple query to give us at least part of this: select source, count(source) from contact1 where createby = ‘goldbox’ group by source order by count(source) […]
03/02/2014 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesIf you have an opportunity, or a project, with a number of contacts attached, then it’s sometimes useful to be able to send an email, or to schedule activities, to all of them at once. You can’t do this directly from the opportunity or project screen, and so you need to add everyone into a […]
29/01/2014 – in GoldMine, SQL queriesI quite often find random phone numbers in my phone log and so want to search GoldMine to see who has called me. This is a harder than it seems though: a phone number, if it exists at all, may be in any one of 3 fields in contact1 (4 if you count the fax […]
Searching on the ‘owner’ field
19/12/2013 – in GoldMine, TechniquesGoldMine’s search centre lets you build complex search terms very easily, using any field in the database, and is a quick and easy alternative to using the filter builder. The Owner field presents its own challenges though, and there is a definite inconsistency between how it’s represented in the two places. Searching for records that […]
Taming the SQL Report Server log file
09/12/2013 – in OS / EnvironmentMore and more of our customers are using SQL Reporting Services now. It’s a very powerful and flexible reporting platform but it comes with one big caveat: left to its own devices, the report services database log file can quickly expand to firstly fill your hard disk, then your server room, before oozing out and […]
Another query for extracting email addresses
30/10/2013 – in SQL queriesA customer phoned earlier and asked for a query that would extract the email addresses of additional contacts, plus their names and their job titles. This involved an internal join on the contsupp table and demonstrates a couple of useful techniques, so I thought it worth sharing. Here’s the script: select contact.accountno,contact.contact, contact.title, coalesce(email.contsupref+email.address1,email.contsupref) from […]
26/06/2013 – in TechniquesGoldMine has a big button marked ‘Message’ at the top of the contact record. Its job is to allow one user to take a phone message for another. However (Warning! Personal gripe coming up!) this is one of those areas where the good people at GoldMine took something that had worked perfectly for years and […]
Find records with no primary email address
11/06/2013 – in SQL queriesEach contact in GoldMine may have any number of email addresses, and one of those should be marked as being the primary address. However, as contacts are changed and edited, this may be lost. The original primary address may have been deleted, for instance, without another being promoted in its place. This query will find […]
28/03/2013 – in iGoldMIneThe iGoldMine licensing process can be somewhat baffling, and there are implications when you move the software to another server. This article will try and lift the fog a little. iGoldMine, although a FrontRange product, is based on technology from a company called Graphon. FrontRange will provide you with a product code which is used […]
Extract a list of e-mail addresses
12/03/2013 – in SQL queriesE-mail addresses are held in the contsupp table. The address itself is held in the contsupref field but, if it’s any longer than 35 characters then the overflow is held in contsupp.address1. The address2 field holds the contact name to whom the e-mail address belongs, although sometimes – not always! – this is blank for […]
Separate databases in GoldMine
18/02/2013 – in TechniquesIt’s quite common to have separate contact sets in GoldMine. Usually these will share field layouts, calendar, etc (the so-called ‘GoldMine Tables’), but sometimes you might want to have total separation. A nice easy way is to use the command-line parameter /g: to override the GoldDir specified in the gm.ini, So, if the GoldMine shortcut […]
13/02/2013 – in TechniquesGoldMine doesn’t have the ability to store ‘favourite’ records and return to them, so we thought it would be interesting to find a way of adding it. GoldMine does of course have the ‘recently visited’ list, but that isn’t the same thing at all. It actually turned out to be very simple, thanks to the […]
28/01/2013 – in TechniquesMore and more people are using GoldMine in conjunction with their mobile phones. Products such as GoldMine Mobile Edition and wMobile give live access to the GoldMine database, and Companionlink can synchronise GoldMine with a phone’s native contacts and calendar. Email can still be a problem though. This post will look at the two sides […]
Showing a contact’s photo in GM+View
28/01/2013 – in TechniquesSome GoldMine clients (model and theatrical agencies for example) find it useful to show a picture of the primary contact on the GM+View tab. The GM+View code for this is very simple: (!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”) (HTML)(HEAD) (STYLE type=text/css) P, UL, OL, DL, DIR, MENU, PRE { margin: 0 auto;}(/STYLE) (META name=GENERATOR […]
23/11/2012 – in OS / EnvironmentMore and more of our customers are using Macs on Windows networks. One thing that can easily trip things up though is file and folder naming. Macs are far more tolerant of strange characters in names than Windows is and will happily accept forward- and back-slashes, asterisks, and all manner of characters that can make […]
05/11/2012 – in TechniquesGoldMine has had the ability to import data from web forms for many years now. Not many people make use of this feature though, mainly because it is perceived to be at the complicated end of spectrum. It’s actually pretty easy, and is a very useful tool. You can create new records, update existing ones […]
25/09/2012 – in SQL queriesIt can sometimes be difficult to know precisely which version of SQL Server you are running. Luckily, a simple query can reveal all: select @@version You can run this in Query Analyser (SQL 2000), in Management Studio (SQL 2005+) and even in GoldMine’s own SQL query window.
How emails are stored in GoldMine
30/08/2012 – in StructureEmails in the inbox have two parts to them: an entry in the mailbox table (where the body of the email resides) and an entry in the cal table in order that it can appear on a user’s calendar/activity list. The cal entry may or may not have an accountno, depending on whether or not […]
Who has got what in the Calendar?
29/08/2012 – in Crystal, SQL queriesHere’s a quick SQL query that will show you who has got what in the calendar: select userid+’ ‘+rectype, count(userid+’ ‘+rectype) from cal group by userid+’ ‘+rectype order by count(userid+’ ‘+rectype) desc It’s very simple in that it just shows the type of activity as a single letter rather than trying to translate it. The […]
29/08/2012 – in TechniquesIf, when creating a group from the results of a SQL query, you find that the group doesn’t contain all of the records that you expect, then the explanation will probably be that your query isn’t returning the accountno field. GoldMine is inconsistent in this regard. Sometimes a group will build happily without the accountno […]
Speed up email filing/deleting
06/08/2012 – in TechniquesIf you find that GoldMine is being slow when filing or deleting emails, then here’s something that may help. If the contact record that is currently displayed has a lot of history on it, then that will slow down the filing or deleting process to a considerable degree – even if the record has nothing […]
29/07/2012 – in TechniquesWhen setting up Automated Processes you may find that the ‘Options’ button on the Send Email page does nothing. This is simply because the logged-in user does not have his or her email preferences set up. In my view this isn’t entirely logical; the person setting up the processes may not necessarily be the one […]
19/06/2012 – in Crystal, OS / EnvironmentCrystal Reports, like GoldBox, can sometimes fall foul of Windows’ Data Execution Protection. The symptoms are that the program fails silently when you try to run it. You will see a second or two of the hour-glass and then nothing. A look in the system logs will show Event ID 1000. The solution is to add […]
29/05/2012 – in TechniquesGoldMine’s User Variables let you store all manner of user-specific information that may be merged into emails and documents. Some of these may be entered via a user’s preferences (Title, Phone, Fax, Department) but you can add any number of additional variables just by editing the user’s INI file (eg FRED.INI). The INI file contains […]
How to use GM logs for forensics
04/04/2012 – in SQL queriesThe GoldMine user logs (Tools>Logs>GoldMine Logs>User Login Logs) give you a quick and easy way of seeing when current users logged in and out. However, the list of users doesn’t include users who have been deleted. However, as long as you haven’t pruned the logs themselves, which is good practice to do now and again […]
GoldMine contantly re-runs installer: fix
01/03/2012 – in IssuesWe met this on our own server and it drove us mad for a few hours. Basically, we could log onto the server and run GoldMine as Administrator and all was well; but, when logging in as another user via iGoldMine, GoldMine would launch its installer with the message: “please wait while windows configures goldmine”. […]
Add a unique reference to an import file
17/02/2012 – in SQL queriesWhen importing into GoldMine it’s often useful to have a unique reference against every line in the import file. If the source data is held in a SQL table then you can run the following script to generate this. First you need to create two new columns: impref (VARCHAR) and impcount (INT). The process will […]
How to identify primary email addresses
20/01/2012 – in SQL queriesIt’s easy enough to write a query to find email address records in GoldMine. This simple one does the job: select * from contsupp where contact=’e-mail address’ However, if we want to limit the results to just primary addresses then we also need to look at the flags that are held in the Zip field. […]
Script to find duplicate records
17/01/2012 – in SQL queriesHere is a very simple SQL script that you can run in GoldMine to find duplicate records. select * from contact1 as c1a, contact1 as c1b where c1a.company=c1b.company and c1a.contact=c1b.contact and c1a.accountno<>c1b.accountno order by c1a.company, c1a.contact As it stands it looks for matches in the company and contact fields but, obviously, you could amend this […]
Find out where your linked docs live
11/01/2012 – in SQL queriesHere’s a SQL query that will you show you a count of all the document paths referenced under the Links Tabs in your GoldMine database: use goldmine select substring(address1+address2,1,len(address1+address2)-CHARINDEX(‘\’, reverse(address1+address2))), COUNT(substring(address1+address2,1,len(address1+address2)-CHARINDEX(”, reverse(address1+address2)))) from CONTSUPP where RECTYPE=’L’ or RECTYPE=’F’ group by substring(address1+address2,1,len(address1+address2)-CHARINDEX(‘\’, reverse(address1+address2))) order by substring(address1+address2,1,len(address1+address2)-CHARINDEX(‘\’, reverse(address1+address2))) The only snag is that you must run this […]
09/01/2012 – in iGoldMIneIf you have iGoldMine or iHeat clients who are running OS X 10.7 (Lion) then you’ll need to upgrade your iGoldMine or iHeat to the Version 9 Patch 3 release. The instructions say that, if you already have iGM 9 / iH 9 installed, you can install the patch over the top. We have found, […]
05/01/2012 – in SQL queriesIf you were to believe what GoldMine tells you, you’d think that once an opportunity is closed (whether won or lost) then it can never be re-opened. Rubbish! However, it does require a quick trip into SQL Management Studio so all the usual caveats apply: do a backup first and don’t attempt this if you’re […]
04/01/2012 – in StructureGM+View pages are written in HTML, and so are basically small web pages in their own right. They are held in the Mailbox table within the GoldMine database, and can be found with the following query: select * from mailbox where folder=’X-GM-HTMLTAB’ A second query will bring out a properties entry for the tab itself: […]
07/12/2011 – in SQL queriesLet’s say that you’ve built a group and that you then want to run a SQL query on the members of that group, perhaps to see who has responded to a campaign. Groups are held in the contgrps table, and it’s not that hard to build a query on them. For instance, the following query […]
Transferring databases between SQL versions
21/11/2011 – in TechniquesYou may find yourself in a situation where you need to transfer a GoldMine database from a later to an earlier version of SQL. A simple backup and restore won’t work in this instance. Googling for an answer may lead you to try to transfer the data by means of the Scripting Wizard in Management […]
03/10/2011 – in OS / EnvironmentUsers of old versions of GoldMine or Heat on Windows Vista or Windows 7 may suddenly get the following error when trying to run the program: “A referral was returned from the server”. What has happened is that the certificate on the software has expired and Windows will no longer let it run. There are […]
Rounding up durations in Crystal
26/09/2011 – in CrystalI had to write an interesting formula today which I thought I’d share with the world. The challenge was to report on the duration field in conthist, and to round it up to the nearest five minutes. So, for example, 1 minute would become 5 minutes, 43 would become 45, etc. This was so that […]
28/07/2011 – in iGoldMIneThe new iGoldMine / iHeat is a many-splendoured thing but, like so much software these days, it tries to be a bit too clever for its own good. The installation sets the default document of the site to be logon.html which, when run from a browser, tries to automatically launch the relevant plug-in…which may not […]
Finding duplicate contact2 entries
18/07/2011 – in SQL queriesOlder versions of GoldMine sometimes created duplicate contact2 entries. These can lie undetected for years, and only become apparent when you run a Crystal Report, or you might see multiple results for the same record come up in the Contact Search Centre. To see if you have any, just run this query: select accountno, count(accountno) […]
Beating the 10,000 record SQL limit in GM
23/06/2011 – in SQL queries** Note: it is now possible to set the SQL limit from the GoldMine UI – just go to Tools > Configure > System Settings > Display ** When you write a SQL query in GoldMine you are, by default, limited to 10,000 results. You can break through this barrier though by using a setting […]
GM Notes fields in Crystal Reports
28/04/2011 – in CrystalEver since the advent of GoldMine PE 8.5 the notes fields in the various tables have been changed to ‘image’ type fields in the SQL database. This gives Crystal Reports some problems. You can’t just place a notes field on your report any more; or rather you can, but you won’t see anything worthwhile. The […]
01/03/2011 – in SQL queriesSometimes when writing a report in Crystal you find that you need a table that contains a sequential series of dates. This simple query will generate one for you. Change the database name and the beginning and end dates to suit your needs. use goldmine create table [dbo].[daterange] ([date] [datetime] null) DECLARE @dDate DateTime, @dEndDate […]
Numeric data in non-numeric fields
28/02/2011 – in SQL queriesSometimes in GoldMine it’s necessary to use a text field to hold numeric data. Examples are the in Key Fields and in Details. The only difficulty comes when you want to sort the data. Because the numbers are being interpreted as characters (you can think of them as letters), ’20’ will come after ‘1000’ – […]
Downloading Mac client from iGM/iHeat
21/02/2011 – in iGoldMIneiGoldMine and iHeat both have downloadable Mac clients but Windows IIS can be sniffy about giving your users access to them. This is because Windows has no idea what ‘.dmg’ files are and so refuses to acknowledge their existence. The result is that users get an ‘iGoldMine.dmg file not found’ error when they try to […]
Deleting old backups in SQL 2008
15/02/2011 – in OS / EnvironmentMany people have found that SQL maintenance plans in SQL Server 2008 won’t delete old backups. The solution is to pay careful attention to the extension that the plan is being told to look for. By default, most people type in ‘.bak’, ie with a dot. Don’t. Just tell it to look for bak without […]
15/02/2011 – in GoldBox, OS / EnvironmentGoldBox has been known to fall foul of Windows’ Data Execution Protection. This is a security feature of Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista and Windows 7. The symptom is that GoldBox won’t run. There will be no error message nor any event logged in the system logs; it just won’t start. The solution is to […]
18/01/2011 – in SQL queriesIf you rely on synchronisation for remote access then things are a little more complicated than the situation I will describe here; likewise if the deleted record has been recreated by hand. If you are in any doubt, give us a call to discuss your problem in greater detail. The following discussion assumes that you […]
18/01/2011 – in CrystalSometimes Crystal Reports can be a bit funny about exporting to PDF files. A case in point is when it will refuse to include a graph in the export. A solution that we have been told of is to put a page break (in the section manager) before the graph.
18/01/2011 – in CrystalCrystal Reports gives you the option of grouping by quarters, but it’s not very obvious how to do calculations that rely on knowing which quarter a particular date falls in. The answer is to use the datepart function. For instance, to display the quarter for a particular date, formatted as ‘2011 – quarter 3’, you […]
03/01/2011 – in GoldMineUsers who are still on GoldMine 6.7 or earlier may be encountering the following error: “Please note that your computer’s system date is erroneously set to 01/02/2011. GoldMine’s synchronization may not function property unless the system date is set correct. Would you like to correct the system’s date now?” FrontRange have informed us that GoldMine, […]
07/12/2010 – in GoldMineGoldMine licences are now version-specific. That is, a licence intended for GM 8 will not work on GM 9 and vice versa. When you try to add the wrong generation of licence you will get an error that says: License is obsolete. Version 8 licences take the form: E-xxxx8x-…. Version 9 licences take the form: […]
Scheduling to a filter or group
26/10/2010 – in TechniquesIf you’re new to GMPE after having used GMCE in the past you’ll find that some things have moved and might be difficult to find at first. One such item is scheduling an activity to a filter or group. In the old days there was a tab on the scheduling window called ‘Filter/Group’. That has […]
Fix for GM email template issues
10/06/2010 – in TechniquesWe’ve written before about the problems that people have with GoldMine’s email templates. To recap: often, when replying to an incoming email, the formatting that you have specified in your template goes out of the window and you see random font changes accompanied, often, by double-spacing. In the article referenced above we suggested that you […]
06/05/2010 – in SQL queriesLong SQL queries entered in GoldMine can sometimes end up a bit unreadable as GoldMine doesn’t have any formatting options. A quick way of seeing the wood for the trees is to copy the code into the form at: http://www.sqlinform.com/free_online_sw.html Many thanks to Chad Smith at www.thegoldmineblog.com for finding this.
Identifying users with overflowing inboxes
31/03/2010 – in SQL queriesAs any long-time GoldMine user will know, emails in GoldMine should be filed (or fast-filed) rather than left in the inbox. As discussed in a previous post (here), an overflowing inbox can stop new emails appearing; what wasn’t mentioned there is that it can also have a very serious impact on performance. Here are a […]
Formatting GoldMine email templates (pt 2)
24/03/2010 – in TechniquesFurther to a post we put up a few days ago (here) here’s another handy tip. Mention was made in the original post of a way to stop any formatting in a message that you’re replying to upsetting the layout of your own template, causing double spacing, random font changes and other undesireable effects. The […]
Registering on the FRS support site
19/03/2010 – in OS / EnvironmentIn order to gain access to the FrontRange customer support site, and also to Net Updates, you will need a user name and password. These are provided by the Customer Care team at FrontRange. We can help you to get these, but you might find it easier to to obtain them directly. Phone 0118 938 […]
19/03/2010 – in OS / EnvironmentGoldMine works well on Citrix although, because FrontRange don’t have a Citrix set-up themselves, it isn’t officially supported. That hasn’t stopped many people using it successfully. GISMO is a bit tricky though, and takes a small amount of fiddling about to get it to work. First of all, log into a Citrix session and install […]
Formatting GoldMine email templates
25/02/2010 – in TechniquesGoldMine email templates give you a great deal of scope for personalising your communications and many people use them to generate standard ‘signatures’. There are some things to remember though in order to get them to behave properly. 1. Because GoldMine uses components of Internet Explorer in order to render HTML, you must go into […]
New emails not appearing in inbox
22/02/2010 – in IssuesIt’s important to remember that GoldMine has a different paradigm from Outlook – in Outlook you leave everything in your inbox (whether in sub-folders or not) whereas in GoldMine you are supposed to file (or fast-file) your emails into History. If you don’t do this, and the number of emails in your inbox comes to […]
How to restart the GM installation process
12/02/2010 – in IssuesIf you stop the GoldMine installer before it completes and then try to re-run it you get an error that says ‘another GoldMine installation is running’. The fix for this is easy, but it does involve going into the registry (so, as with playing with scissors, make sure that a responsible adult is on hand). […]
Marketing emails and Outlook 2007
14/01/2010 – in TechniquesMany people use GoldMine to send marketing emails but not all may be aware of changes in Outlook that can seriously compromise the look of the results. It is a statistical inevitability that most of the emails that you send from GoldMine will be viewed in Outlook. Until the 2007 edition, Outlook used to use […]
14/12/2009 – in iGoldMIneKaspersky Anti-Virus is known to cause a problem with iGoldMine and iHeat servers. When a session disconnects then CPU usage on the server shoots up and stays high, while the server itself freezes. The only solution that we have found is to disable Kaspersky altogether.
21/10/2009 – in Add-OnsNotice from Solica (authors of Details Plus) for users of GoldMine PE 8.5: When Details Plus first came out about 8 years ago, one of the unique features was that it gave access to four additional normal fields as well as one extra notes field. The extra fields are for the DEAR, MERGECODES, FAX and […]
Right-clicking in iGM / iHeat (Mac)
14/10/2009 – in iGoldMIneSome Mac users have been struggling to get iGoldMine and iHeat to accept right-clicks, as the ctrl-click option that Mac users are familiar with does nothing. You can get round this by using a multi-button mouse or, on a laptop, by using the ‘two finger’ right-click option on the tackpad (available on recent models but […]
Transferring files to/from CSL FTP
09/09/2009 – in OS / EnvironmentSometimes we’ll ask you to send us a file, or to download one, from the Canonbury Services FTP site (ftp://ftp.canonbury-services.co.uk). You can use Windows Explorer to do this but, for this to work, the ‘Use Passive FTP’ setting in your computer’s Internet Options must be unticked.
23/07/2009 – in iGoldMIneIf you use the iGoldMine Java client with Firefox then you’ll find that the latest version of iGoldMine no longer supports the signed client in that browser, just the unsigned one. Trying to run the signed client will generate either an error or a blank page. Some people have reported that the IE View plug-in […]
Signature files in GoldMine 7.5
18/05/2009 – in IssuesThose of you on GMCE 7.5 may have noticed that your signature files no longer work as expected. The symptom: no line breaks or carriage returns in the signature. The solution: append a less-than sign followed by br followed by a greater-than sign to the end of every line in the signature file.
03/05/2009 – in SQL queriesWhen you’ve had GoldMine for a while, and added and deleted fields a few times, you might find that your custom fields list ends up containing a number of fields that are no longer used. This SQL script will identify them for you. Simply run it from the SQL Query page within GoldMine itself. select […]
01/05/2009 – in OS / EnvironmentSQL 2005 isn’t quite as friendly as SQL 2000, and there are a couple of things you have to do before you can set up a maintenance plan. Firstly, SQL Integration Services (SSIS) have to be installed otherwise you get an error that says ‘specified @subsystem is invalid’ (I love those informative error messages!). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909036 […]
Query to show attachment paths
22/04/2009 – in SQL queriesThe paths to linked documents and infocentre attachments are pretty easy to find in a GoldMine database, but email attachments, if not saved under the Links tab, can be a nightmare to needle out as the attachment path is buried deep in the rfc822 long text field. The following query will list all the attachment […]
Query to show Long Text / Image fields
21/04/2009 – in SQL queriesPrevious versions of GoldMine, and Heat, store notes as Long Text fields. Now they are stored as Image fields. The trouble with both of these is that it’s not easy to read what’s in there using a query. Here is a handy little script that will display the contents of a Long Text field. It […]
06/04/2009 – in TechniquesHere’s a simple trick you can do with the Taskbar which will allow you to browse a contact-related folder in Explorer. I say contact-related because it assumes that the folder name can be found in a GoldMine field (company, contact, key1, you name it). It’s really simple: 1. Add a new taskbar button of type […]
27/03/2009 – in TechniquesThe GM+View has been there for a couple of years now but very few people find anything much useful to do with it. But here’s something handy: you can use it to make a document of your choice appear as part of the record. The first thing to do is to save the document as […]
How to tell which version of iGoldMine you have
05/03/2009 – in iGoldMIneiGoldMine’s nomencleture is a funny animal; FrontRange talks about iGoldMine 7 and iGoldMine 8, but if you look at ‘Help | About’ in the Cluster Manager you see that actually it’s version 3, regardless! Hmm. The easiest way of telling which you have is to go to ‘program filescommon filesfrontrange solutions’ and look at the […]
04/03/2009 – in Add-OnsIt’s sometimes useful to think of your contacts geographically; it can give you a fresh perspective and allow you to plan routes and campaigns. There are a couple of options: 1. Closest Contact For GoldMine allows you to build a group of all your contacts within a specified radius of a given postcode. This is […]
24/02/2009 – in Crystal, SQL queriesSQL can have two types of ’empty’ fields: fields that are full of blanks and fields that are so empty they don’t even contain that. It’s like the difference between a jar full of air and a jar that contains a vacuum. They both look the same but they are really quite different. In SQL […]
24/02/2009 – in TechniquesOlder versions of GoldMine would let you access SQL and dBase tables at the same time, and so you could pick which ones you wanted to rehost, and when. PE doesn’t let you open dBase contact sets directly, and so it’s not so obvious how to get at them to rehost them. The users table […]
24/02/2009 – in TechniquesOffice 2000 isn’t officially supported with GMPE, but some people do find that it works with the new GMLink without any problems. Other people aren’t so lucky, and it seems that your operating system may make a difference (XP Home seems to bring out more problems than XP Pro, for example). One thing which does […]
GoldBox 7 record matching issues
24/02/2009 – in GoldBoxGoldBox 7 is very sensitive to certain conditions. It must reside in a directory called GoldBox7 at the drive root; BDE must be set up properly: 1. Under Native drivers / dBase: MDX block size 1024 and memo block size 512; 2. Under System / init: Default driver dBase, Maxfilehandles 255 or greater, sharedmemlocation 6BDE […]
Taming the ‘previously viewed’ list
24/02/2009 – in SQL queries** Note: The number of previously-viewed items can now be set in Tools > Options > System ** If you use PE you’ll have noticed that it keeps track of the last 50 records you’ve viewed. This is great, but a list that long can slow GoldMine down as well as being less than useful […]