Castell Computers

This quote is from FrontRange Support Services. Maybe it will clear up some questions the early-adopters/adventurous among you are having…

FrontRange Support Services would like to make you aware that another release of GoldMine Corporate Edition – build 7.00.51018 is now available. Some customers may have downloaded build 7.00.51015 last week. The new build addresses an issue that occurred while migrating data from dBase to either a SQL or Firebird database.

If your installation with build 7.00.51015 did not involve a migration of data from dBase to SQL or Firebird and everything is working fine, there is no reason to take action. If you have not installed yet, we recommended downloading and installing build 7.00.51018. If you installed and are having problems, we recommend you complete a backup, uninstall 7.00.51015, reinstall 7.00.51018 and restore the data.

If you have any questions related to the new build or the upgrade process, please contact your Solutions Partner or FrontRange Support Services at 800.755.2100, Option 3 for assistance. Thank you for your continued patronage.

That being said, I do not suggest that users upgrade to this build yet. I am advising my clients to ‘wait and see’ for the moment.

Have you ever looked at the NOTES tab and wished it’s name was ‘Memo’? How about FIELDS? Does ‘More..’ sound better?

GoldMine has always had the ability to re-name tabs, but it’s never been very well documented and it was always a user-by-user setting controlled by settings within each user’s username.ini file. To make sure everyone saw the same tabs with the same custom names, admins would need to resort to hand-modifying every user’s ini file or using automated, sometimes buggy, tools to globally edit all the ini files at once.

There IS a better way. With 6.7, the Corporate Overrides ini setting can be leveraged to modify the order and/or label on the GoldMine standard tabs (sorry, no details or custom field-view based tabs.) Just add the following to the GM.INI file to enforce the standard layout for the tabs for all users — regardless of their individual settings in their preferences:

[User-OverRide:GoldMine]
ROTabItems1=1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9;10;11;12;13;14;
ROTabs1=Summary,Fields,GM+View,Notes,Contacts,Details,
Referrals,Pending,History,Links,Members,Tracks,Opptys,Projects

To change the labels on the NOTES, FIELDS, GM+View and Contacts tabs, you might modify the ROTabs1 line like this:

[User-OverRide:GoldMine]
ROTabItems1=1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9;10;11;12;13;14;
ROTabs1=Summary,More,Portal,Memo,Others,Details,Referrals,
Pending,History,Links,Members,Tracks,Opptys,Projects

It’s also possible to modify the order of the tabs by modifying the ROTabsItems1 line like this:

[User-OverRide:GoldMine]
ROTabItems1=2;3;5;6;7;8;9;10;11;12;13;14;1;4;
ROTabs1=More,Portal,Others,Details,Referrals,Pending,History,
Links,Members,Tracks,Opptys,Projects,Summary,Memo

…just be sure you modify the ROTabs1 like to match the order! If you don’t, you might go to the Memo (notes) tab only to find your additional contacts!

Beyond leveraging it to modify tab layouts, the User-Override function in the GM.INI is a very powerful method that can help to enforce all manner of rules that users sometime prefer to ignore.

It wraps the settings that one normally sees in the username.ini with this format:

[User-OverRide:{User.INI Section Name}]
{User.INI Setting}=

I’d be interested to hear some comments from admins on how they’re using (or might like to use) this in their installations!

FrontRange have announced their intention to release one more GoldMine 6.x update. It will be version 6.8 and is slated to be released late this year. I believe a more realistic timeframe is probably some time in the first quarter of 2006. It’s been stated that this will be a nod to dBase users who are enrolled in the UPP program but haven’t seen an update in quite some time. It is also supposed to trickle down some GoldMine 7.0 features to 6.x/dBase users. I’m holding out hope for a couple of my favorite features (more on that once 7.0 is released and I can talk about some of them!)

Regardless of the number of gee-whiz features GoldMine 6.8 includes and regardless of exactly WHEN it’s released, I see this as a win-win move for FrontRange’s PR and for their customers. Since GoldMine 7.0 will be a ‘Corporate Edition’ ONLY release, 6.8 will give the dBase users who didn’t get caught up in the whole 10-user cut-off upgrade-or-else campaign (they’re backing down on that, it appears!) — until 7.1 is released (rumored to be the first 7.x version to allow ‘Standard Edition’ users into the 7.0 club.)

With the release of GoldMine 6.7, users got a lot of bug fixes, some nice new features and some sorely needed tweaks. One of those little tweaks has turned out to be quite an annoyance that I hear about from nearly every user I upgrade to version 6.7.

A little background: Prior to GoldMine 6.7, if you had your e-mail center open to the inbox and your e-mail automatically retrieving in the background, it would show up at the bottom of the list. This might not have been such a big deal unless you happened to have more than a few pieces of mail in your inbox. If you did, new mail might not be apparent to you unless you manually refreshed the inbox by leaving and returning or re-sorting by the data column.

Needless to say, the matter was brought to the attention of the Frontrange developers more than a few times.

With the initial release of GoldMine 6.7, they fixed the problem by automatically refreshing the inbox. The problem is, whenever it refreshed, it would steal focus, meaning that if you happened to be typing (writing in word, composing a GoldMine e-mail or completing a call, for instance) you were unceremoniously flipped to the e-mail center’s inbox. If you’re a keyboard-looker typist, like me, this could result in you carrying out any number of random commands on your inbox as you typed…

The last release of 6.7 corrected the focus problem, but it does still overtly refresh the inbox and still grabs the screen (for instance, while playing a full-screen video game (get back to work!)) in some instances.

Frontrange doesn’t offer any options in the preferences area to turn the refreshing on/off nor is there any option to specify how often the refreshes occur (the default seems to be about 5 minutes.) There is an undocumented option, however.

To fix this:
1. Close GoldMine and open your user.ini (mine is DOUG.INI) with notepad.

2. Locate the [Internet] section and see if you find the setting FolderRefreshDelay=

3. If it’s there, change it, if it’s not, add it and set it to 9999999, like this:

[Internet]
FolderRefreshDelay=9999999

Of course, with this setting, you’re back to having your auto-retrieved e-mail stealthily appearing at the bottom of your inbox… But, if you don’t auto-retrieve mail or don’t like the auto-refresh enough to live with having to dig for your new mail once in a while, this setting is for you.