Castell Computers

Vineyardsoft, the makers of Knowledgesync, a popular GoldMine add-on (if you haven’t heard of it before, think of it as Automated Processes on steroids) presented a sneak peek at their new Graphic Event Design Module at Sage Software’s recent Insights user conference.

Frequent readers may recall that I recently mused that I wished someone would allow me to draw my AP’s in the open source utility, Dia. Well, while Vineyardsoft haven’t quite gone that far, they appear to be poised to allow me to draw my AP replacement in Knowledgesync. Not too shabby!

From a recent Vineyardsoft press release:

The new UI was exceedingly-well received at Insights and there is a PowerPoint presentation available that gives you a brief overview of what the new UI looks like and what some of its capabilities are. You can download this presentation from:

www.vineyardsoft.com/lit/ks_gui_oview.pps

As for availability of this module, we anticipate its availability within 3 - 4 weeks. Currently we are concluding round #1 of beta and our Development staff is making changes based on the initial feedback and testing that was done. If you would like to be included in the round #2 beta process for the new UI, please send your name to Don Farber at farber@vineyardsoft.com and you will be sent information on the latest build of the new version as soon as it is ready.

Excel 2007 has become a reality and we all have to deal with it. If you use it, I sympathize, it was probably installed on the machine for you by your hardware manufacturer or IT department. Regardless of how it got there, you need to deal with the policies implemented in it by Microsoft. One of the most troublesome for GoldMine users is the fact that Excel 2007 is no longer able to open or save a .DBF (dBase) file.

Given the widespread popularity of the dBase format, I question the wisdom of Microsoft’s decision here. Questionable or not, GoldMine users still have to find a way to take data provided by 3rd parties and create operable dBase files out of it in order to import it into GoldMine. What tool should we use? Some random tool found via Google? I think not.

OpenOffice 2.2 stands at the ready with solid abilities in the spreadsheet and basic database format arena. The Calc module (the OpenOffice equivalent of Excel) will not be losing the ability to parse various formats any time soon — quite the contrary, you can expect to see it become more and more flexible as time passes. All it takes is some programmer type to make it his or her pet project to add compatibility for format X to the OpenOffice project and, presto, OpenOffice is able to deal with that file type. That’s the beauty of Open Source projects.

I know, I know, listening to some open source advocates prattle on can approach the pitch of a certain recently deceased religious zealot. The overly-excitable folks aside, the beauty of the open source concept just can’t be beat: No sales-driven decisions and a potential development and QA community of 7 billion people — Redmond can’t touch that.

Here’s a little movie that shows off one of my favorite user interface enhancements in GoldMine Premium Edition.

I begin by moving the history tab to the first position. This illustrates the on-the-fly re-ordering of the contact record’s tabs that is now possible.

Next, I right click and select Group. This gives me a little drag-and-drop space above my list of history items into which I can drop the Users column, for instance, to group the data by the values in that column. I can add further levels of grouping by adding more columns to the group hierarchy.

Finally, You may notice that there are down arrows next to all the column headings. This allows the user to apply a filter to the tab’s data by simply dropping down the list of users, for instance, and selecting one of them as I do in the video. Note that there is also a more advanced filtering interface available by selecting Custom… and defining multiple criteria.

When I moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, I found, however, that beauty can definitely be only skin deep. Yes, a lot of development time was spent on the new GoldMine Premium Edition’s interface. The interface does look more modern with it’s shiny buttons and rounded edges, and there are some fantastic productivity enhancements to be found if you know where to look. It’s not just window dressing, GMPE is a strong package and definitely worth a closer look.