Having worked with GoldMine for many years there are key advantages for GoldMine users to upgrade to MSCRM. I worked for GoldMine for 3 years and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Jon and Elan who started the company years before I had gotten there had really built something cool to take average people and gave them a framework to achieve amazing results. Most of the tech support reps at GoldMine own and operate their own businesses and are still great achievers. Meanwhile FrontRange flushed what was great about GoldMine down the drain. From what I can tell they will ride out the original code until it's no longer a viable product.
In GoldMine we were limited to customizing only one table contact2 and custom variables of Contsupp records through details records. There were very clever for their time allowing customization that most applications did not allow at all. However it's a new age and things have moved on. When the founders of GoldMine left the company the "GoldMine" left with them.
MSCRM allows every form, entity and attribute to be customized completely. I actually have customized my forms to look like GoldMine's contact record window. You can also customize the grid windows and places any fields even custom fields on the view. It makes it easier for me to navigate through leads, and contacts. MSCRM can be more confusing than GoldMine because is setup to be used one way so you're limited in your work flow options. In CRM you could have more rope to hang yourself which offers advantages and disadvantages.
In my resignation letter to Mark Durant the Tech Support Manager I listed my concerns about GoldMine specifically the HTML GoldMine which was built on weak backend using BDE. I was very disappointed that they were going down this direction because we all knew it would not really work.
MSCRM is entirely service based. This means it's built on a service based architecture. The Web Client and Outlook client both use the same API to talk to the same business processes. This allows for a rich STABLE experience. The disconnected mode allows for seamless synchronization. Having certified over 160 GoldMine partners to be able to sell and service Synchronization in GoldMine let me tell you it was no easy task.
GoldMine put a lot of effort to make synchronization better but it was a little too much a little too late. It was good for what it was it had its major dilemmas that caused customers a lot of headaches. The underlying technology was very bare didn't provide a basic infrastructure to sync data it was all developed by one person. It's amazing it worked at all.
MSCRM uses .Net higher level language that provides structures in the code that allow to synchronize offline data back in to the database. This is based on fundamental data principles and the engineering effort of many people for over the past 5 years. Unless GoldMine provided the same kind of experience on the same platform they could never come to complete with it.
MSCRM provides reporting services for reports. This allows for all the vision people in company to subscribe to reports. Although there are some quirks in reporting services it's nothing like the 10 years of Crystal DLL conflicts and licensing issues. Even in instances where they could not solve the issue they will wanted to charge our clients for DLL conflicts and licensing problems? Not anymore. The designer works well and the reports come in different formats.
In my blog article CRM the saga there are some install challenges but once you get past those the system runs pretty well. The MSCRM outlook client allows really nice integration with outlook which is far superior in drafting email messages. However it has lacked in e-mail work flow. In outlook 2007 which does not work with CRM yet but at least the work flow issues are resolved. You have to use exchange to use the built in integration. However it doesn't look to hard to establish your own link. Microsoft's workaround is to copy and paste email messages? Could imagine and I sent and received 18,000 messages in 2005. To copy and paste isn't a real work around for people doing business.
In CRM we have Lead and Contact for storing information about someone. A Lead is more for prospects and there are features to upgrade a lead to a Contact, Account and Opportunity. The workflow engine in CRM is what we called Automated Processes in GoldMine. The CRM engine can process events on any object with any condition. Again a lot of freedom that could allow for making mistakes. There are tools for monitoring your processes so they don't get stuck in endless loops. However they kick in effectively no scanning needed to fire events it's using a real event model. The sales stage in CRM is linked to how opportunities are setup.
Managing leads can be a little tedious and overall managing the system in the web client feels very structured requiring a lot of setup for the flexibility it provides. For instance defining a unit of measure. There is some setup requires but it's not rocket science. Since the same engine works for sales as well as service and tracking time on contacts and cases this works great for servicing clients. With GoldMine you could link Heat to GoldMine. It was problematic at best but I hear it's working better now. Although MSCRM provides a more modeled environment with a lot of options the right people could customize CRM to effectively manage work flow.
I never opted to sell or service GoldMine since a lot of friends provides those services. We do some custom development but I found the support from GoldMine on the API is weaker now. Most of the people who were truly helpful have moved on. Even the core development team is no longer working on the project. Right now the theory we are buying in to that is Microsoft penetrated the GoldMine board of directors and paid them off to run the company in to the ground. It's the only explanation we can come up with how you could possible blow 80 million dollars, loose 1500 partners. Yet, on their web site they have twice as many users? I remember at a conference they told Platinum partners that they would be "lesser" partner than they were before. Dave Dunlap who had sold GoldMine for probably a decade you could feel the sense of how betrayed he felt. The marketing executive told him he would need to me more like the top 3 GoldMine partners which the whole focus revolved around. What was truly funny was that Michael Gerber (e-myth) was a speaker there. Who said "the top 3 goldmine partners are only at 10%". A few months later the top 3 GoldMine partners were out of business. Good luck with that.
MSCRM provides an ideal environment for sales and support for companies that want to be up and running sooner on technology that most people already know how to use like Outlook. In fact the environment is designed to be intuitive like Outlook. Still providing the tools, workflow, development hooks to truly be affective in today's competitive market place.
ProjectThunder is set to start it's CRM offering of Customization and deployment of hosted or delivered CRM systems on the CRM platform. Our experience with ASP.Net form our world class e-commerce deployments and web site marketing allows us to customize CRM, integrate with web sales for up sell opportunities and create more traffic for more leads on your web site. This increases productively which equals more sales and opportunities. ProjectThunder delivers web based content management, e-commerce, more qualified traffic, more leads from your web site directly in to your CRM system. This how e-commerce and CRM bring the best of both worlds.
