ContactReview :: View topic - Exporting Goldmine 6.7 (dBase) "History" tab

andyb · n00b

Hi there,

I've been viewing these forums for quite a few years now - I've never had to make a post because usually I've been able to find all the answers to all of my questions. So, thanks for creating such an excellent resource Doug!

Anyway, after many years we're looking to give Goldmine 6.7 the boot and replace it with something else (haven't gotten that far yet).

At the moment I'm in a process of exporting data in chunks of data from each user as there is a lot of useless data that we don't want to move across.

In our line of work we depend heavily on the "History" tab for making notes on candidates and also our clients so for us this is just as vital as keeping the contact information. We also use the "Linked Documents" quite a lot.

I have found that within Goldmine the only way to export the contact information + the History and Linked Documents tabs is to export it in the XML format with the XSD schema file attached.

The exported XML file seems to be fine from the offset. However I tried to open it open it up in Excel and it just seems to turn everything into one massive mess with no structure!

I've also tried to use the Schema in the XSD to map the columns in Excel and then import the XML into these columns but this doesn't appear to work at all.

What I want to do is basically be able to have a visual in excel as this will make it easier to convert into whatever format our future database will require.

I can see that there might be a problem with the history tab considering that each logged call or note taken down is a separate string in the XML file. So I'd also be keen on establishing whether it was possible to merge these into a lump file during the export or even at all?

Does anybody have any experience in exporting data in this way, or any recommendations for us? As I said the History tab is so important to us and we really do need to keep it the data that's in there!

Sorry for the wall of text!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Kind Regards

Andy

DougCastell · GoldMine Guru

Your simplest course of action would be to upgrade to the latest version of GoldMine (GoldMine 2014.2, at the moment.) The data would upgrade, in-place, and the interface would be an evolution of the one you use today.

Alternately, yes, you'll have a complicated data conversion project ahead of you. How complicated it is would depend heavily on what product you decide to migrate to.

If you have decided that you're dead-set against a GoldMine upgrade, I'd suggest you decide on what product you are moving to before you begin to tackle the data migration details -- who knows, the product you go with may have a utility for importing GoldMine data.

andyb · n00b

Thanks for the reply!

I had a feeling that would probably be the case. I don't know if we can justify spending that much on Goldmine 2014 though...

We're still a long way off determining which CRM we want to use - our three primary factors are:

1) Easily import our data from Goldmine
2) LinkedIn Integration
3) No per user per month fee - we'd like to avoid using cloud and keep it hosted locally.

Although it seems these days you can't have one of these without the other. I'll have to weigh up which one is the most important to us I guess!

Do you know if it is at all possible to export a merged file containing all content from the history tab?

Even if it's just one record at a time so if necessary I can just do it as I go along after exporting the contact info.

Kind Regards

Andy

DougCastell · GoldMine Guru

DJ · GoldMine Guru

It might be possible to create a Report in GoldMine that would give you all of the information that you need in say a PDF form. You might then be able to use OCR to convert that into text.