When I first started working in the area of Sales Force Automation in 1995, I became acquainted with Goldmine. At the time, it was practically the only game in town. There were three major players to choose from, all with similar functions and varying levels of channel support. You either used On Contact!, Act! or Goldmine (the only one without an exclamation mark after its name!).

The company I was working for at the time had elected to displace their character-based and broken Brock system (can anyone honestly blame them?) in favor of a Windows-based contact manager. Goldmine won because it offered some tight integration with Microsoft tools, and that's when I began to take a vested interest in the tool.

Over the years I have watched Goldmine mature from a good product with a limited set of functions and features to a huge product that easily competes with the big boys of the world (Siebel, anyone?). Now while these added features and functions are frequently welcomed by end users, there is always a danger of what I call "functional overkill" -- essentially forcing a product to evolve past its core competencies in order to compete in the market place. When vendors take this road, they stand the chance of losing a portion of their client base by overly complicating what is otherwise a great product.

Goldmine does what the majority of contact and opportunity management packages do -- no matter what the price range -- they all track contacts, calendars, sales and notes. The difference is chiefly in presentation and value-added features. For those who prefer plain intuitive spreadsheet-type interfaces, Goldmine is your tool. If you are looking for a fancy, colorful, navigation system, this isn't it. Goldmine is straight-forward in its data presentation which means data entry and searching is direct and easy. On the other hand, in their desire to be all things to all users, you can sometimes get lost hopping between screens and the multitude of tabs that abound.

Rather than compare every feature to its competitors, I'd rather take the high road and concentrate on what I think is different and valuable:

	Goldmine offers a personal Rolodex to store personal records that you don't necessarily want backed up during data synchronization. X
	Goldmine offers many synchronization options including synching with Microsoft Outlook, a Palm Pilot, or a Windows CE device. Even the synchronization process, itself, can be easily customized at the user level to back-up just what you want to back-up. This means if you are working remotely, you can essentially set how long the remote connection should take by selectively choosing just the required data for back-up. X
	Goldmine offers an integrated Project Manager. For those projects requiring a large team effort, this tool can greatly enhance the sales effort. X
	Goldmine offers a Literature Fulfillment module and a scripting module for Telemarketing efforts. X
	Goldmine's calendar function also provides a Peg Board so you can see who is or out of an office based upon their posted schedule.

The sum of these parts and many more is that with Goldmine you get a total solution for the price of one product, whereas many more costly solutions unbundle these individual features into several more costly modules. In this respect, Goldmine has earned itself a respected place in the big leagues at a minor league price.

One last item which is very cool is that Goldmine provides a very thorough computer-based training (CBT) system on their CD. This is enormously helpful to both existing users who are upgrading to the newest version as well as new users who are migrating from another product. The CBT offers textual help as well as sound and video, so you can see and hear demonstrations of activities, and then try them yourself. Why other SFA/CRM companies don't bundle CBT with their products simply amazes me. Good insight on the behalf of the folks from Goldmine!