GoldMine^® Premium Edition 8.5

GoldMine 8.5.1.12 is Gold (General Release)

We’d like to share our thoughts about the release of GoldMine 8.5.  Besides, it’s long overdue.  While the upgrade has its challenges (fewer than most, I might add), the improvements in the product far outweigh the negative effects of a first generation release of software.  We did the upgrade on our 15-year-old database that has gone through multiple upgrades and, with that said, we experienced some of the reported bugs in both the installation/upgrade process of the 8.5 product.  Which is one of the reasons why I hesitated in making a recommendation to upgrade at first.

We make a huge effort to track issues/bugs we find and report them to FrontRange directly.  FrontRange collects these issues from all its sources and develops a new release.  This is 8.5.1.12 for GoldMine Premium.  It is ready for prime time!  Installation/upgrade issues have been by & large resolved - smoother and faster - and many internal program function bugs have also been fixed - but it's never done!   We have performed many, many upgrades at this point and now I can feel confident in my recommendation to upgrade if you haven't done so already.

If you are already running the Premium Edition, there are huge improvements behind the scenes that make it a necessity to get to the next version.  Versions 8.0 - 8.02 were riddled with bugs; 8.03 was an improvement; 8.5 continued the trend; 8.5.1.12 is better still.  Release notes can be found at - http://www.1stdirect.com/goldmine/Premium/releasenotes.html

And the answer for GoldMine Standard Users is simply this … it has been time to upgrade ever since they sunsetted GoldMine Standard Edition 2 years ago.  It is old technology and the rest of the products that support your organization such as operating systems, accounting systems, word processing tools, etc. are moving forward.  To move forward for you and your older Goldmine is to move to Premium to keep up with the rest.

Some of my favorite new functions in 8.5 are Case Management, Preview Pane, Universal Search, Contact List, Left Navigation Bar, etc.  Behind the scenes in the database, columns and indexes were added for speed and usage along with the long awaited change to how GoldMine handles notes.  Notes and mailbox size is an especially touchy issue for all the Standard/dBase users that chose to use notes to track activities and not use History.  Too many notes and a mailbox file size approaching 2Gig can blow up a dBase database with little luck of recovering.  If that's not enough to scare you!

I tried to keep it short, but I had too much information to share! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact First Direct.