Goldmine vs. Act! 2000

[Z_Amon]

I am currently investigating Goldmine and Act! 2000 for use at work by our sales department. Does anybody have experience with either product? One of my principal worries is contact management and sharing. I would really like a centralized database driven server, and from what I have read, the standard versions only do direct file sharing or save a simple file to a central server rather than using a database.

Any recommendations or experiences that you can share would be most useful. Thanks!

Z.

 

[Oak]

WHere I work now we use Goldmine 5.0. WE have 200+ employees with remote offices overseas and domestic. The central server is here, We have a database of 40-60 thousand entries all syncd to remotes. Right no it is buggy as hell, but that is just from a poorly planed rollover from V4 to V5. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

 

[Z_Amon]

Oak-

Thank you for the reply, it's good to know that a group that size can use it successfully and keep it all synched. That's a major worry for me, as many of the people who will be using it are not the type to worry about the technical side of things- such as remembering to synch up.

What do you think of the user interface? Our sales department usually has to be self reliant in terms of basic usage and I'm hoping that the product we end up with will be somewhat user friendly.

Z.

 

[Oak]

Well, Im on the IS side of things, and if you are looking at it from my side, it is a very technical thing to run. We run what is I believe the 'enterprise' edition, so we have a primary and backup server that also holds the databases, and we have a full time employee dedicated to support! Its not me, I dont have much of anything to do with that part, so im afraid im of little use. However, basically the entire company uses it, including sales and marketing, so if they can run the interface after a week or two of break in, anyone can! They use this thing for EVERYTHING! Contacts, proposals, sales, sales numbers, recipts, you name it. Hence us having the full blown version. Basically, the interface is simple enough for sales to pick up with no formal training, but the back end is complicated enough for a full time employee, plus the occasional contract help for changes/upgrades....

Hope that helps... You can probably see some screenshots if you chech the web page, (speculation)

Oak