A serious bug in GoldMine 6.70.61214 is causing data loss — and you might not even notice it!

The highly anticipated GoldMine 6.7 patch released last month brought with it a number of new problems.

A few small ones were installer-related causing various types files in the root of your GoldMine folder to be removed and some MSXML installations picked up mysterious problems after this patch. These two didn’t seriously impact too many people.

What does impact people is a problem one of my clients (hi Mike!) brought to my attention: Using the Complete menu to create a history item on a contact record that currently has no pending activities is very hit-or-miss when it comes to actually recording your history item.

In other words, you might visit the John Smith contact record and go to Complete|Unscheduled|Outgoing Call, fill out the call information and click OK only to have your call NOT ever show up on the history tab. In my testing, this seems to happen about 5 out of 6 times on contact records where there is no pending activity.

Frontrange is aware of the problem and is working on yet another GoldMine 6.7 patch.

In the mean time, the Frontrange-prescribed work-around is to create a pending activity for all the contacts in your database and leave it there until after the fix is released. This can be done via the filter/group tab of the scheduling dialog window.

My take: downgrade back to 6.70.50123 by pulling the .EXE, .DLL and DATADICT.* files and the \TX32\ folder from the backup you made of your GoldMine installation before installing this patch.

If you didn’t make a backup (or you came from an earlier build of GoldMine than 6.70.50123) you’ll need to acquire the GoldMine 6.70.50123 setup file and run it on another machine that does not currently have anything to do with your real GoldMine installation to create a temporary installation of GoldMine from which the above-mentioned files can be pulled. Note that you’ll want to install to a directory location such as c:\temp\ (NOT c:\program files\goldmine\ !!) for the best results.

This is a black eye the new GoldMine development team did not need. I am, however, pleased to see that they intend to make it right by releasing a subsequent patch.