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PRODUCTS GOLDMINE ENTERPRISE EDITION

GoldMine Enterprise Edition is FrontRange Solutions' flagship CRM offering.

GoldMine Premium Edition is an ideal fit for about 80% of our customers. For larger companies however, or for very demanding installations, GoldMine Enterprise Edition is the answer.

GMEE is built on Microsoft .NET, is modular, is very highly configurable and was designed with the idea of integration very much at its core. It uses open standards to communicate with other programs, or with their data, and can incorporate external elements into its interface to give a 360-degree view of your business.

GMEE includes a powerful business rule engine that can respond to external as well as internal data. This can alert users to certain events, or can enforce actions.

It is GMEE’s ability to draw disparate data elements together so that, collectively, they show all of the information about a customer, or an event, or whatever the user is dealing with, that makes it well suited to this project.

GMEE integrates with Microsoft Office so that mail-merges and email communications are seamlessly added to its capabilities.

FrontRange Foundation

GMEE is built on a set of core components called the FrontRange Foundation Layer. The aim is to provide powerful, ready-to-deploy solutions that can be extended to meet the exact needs of customers.

The essential elements of the Foundation are:

The FrontRange Foundation is a three-tiered architecture centred on a set of common business functions and a common data store. Built-in business rules cache and route information within the applications through a metadata-driven architecture. Third-party, external applications and services connect to the data store by a variety of connection methods and technology adapters. These adapters convert proprietary messages from external systems to the standards used within the FrontRange Foundation. The advantage of this architecture is that it delivers, at any given time, a single consolidated view of all pertinent information to the correct application. This provides architectural benefits that:

Metadata Architecture

The configurable and flexible nature of the FrontRange Foundation is largely based on the metadata-driven architecture within the platform.

Business objects and their associated properties are stored as metadata and executed in a Web or smart client application environment at runtime. Applications can be easily changed or extended by simply rearranging business objects and modifying business rules rather than having the business rules hard-coded within the application.

This architecture creates an intelligent way to create and define fields, business rules, data definitions, validations, business object relationships and application attributes that can be easily pulled from the Foundation server and rendered on the client machine.

Powerful graphical application configuration and development tools that let customers modify applications are provided with the platform.

Client Interface and Access

The FrontRange Foundation supports both a rich client environment (executables installed locally) and a Web client environment which offers deployment and support flexibility. If they choose to, users can access the full suite of FrontRange applications through a standard Web browser.

To support customers using the Web client, the FrontRange Foundation uses standard Internet technologies, including HTTP, XML, Microsoft ActiveX, and HTML, to provide a robust client experience over the Web.

Customers who choose to deploy in a zero client environment and reduce the complexities and expenses associated with client installations can use Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Web application server, which allows the FrontRange applications to be quickly deployed in a 100 percent server-based environment.

Integration and Messaging

Utilising a powerful integration and messaging engine, users can quickly and easily create robust integration links between FrontRange applications and other systems and data sources. Messaging transforms data and helps ensure its delivery across the different FrontRange modules and external systems.

The messaging engine is responsible for:

The architecture supports synchronous communication to and from other applications and data sources. The system allows applications to publish messages in response to the invocation of business events within the platform. These messages are published in industry-standard XML and XSLT format and are delivered securely to subscribing systems via HTTP connections.

High-volume message handling is supported through message queues and can be delivered by multiple communication methods, including HTTP, Web services, SOAP, e-mail, FTP, as well as through multiple messaging engines (Microsoft Message Queuing, MQSeries and SwiftMQ). Additional integration support is provided for Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP components through XSLT transformation and LDAP listeners. Active Directory objects and users can be imported and maintained in the FrontRange Foundation using the administration tools provided.

Security

Strong security is a critical requirement for any solution platform. The challenge faced by many organizations is how to balance security requirements with the administrative cost and effort of creating and maintaining security profiles for hundreds or thousands of end users across multiple applications. FrontRange Solutions simplifies system security by allowing customers to manage all their end-user security profiles in a centralized repository. User profiles can be imported from Active Directory or existing systems, and security is enforced through industry-standard authentication mechanisms, including NTLM, Kerberos and Basic. Support for internal authorization is also included in the security subsystem.

Authentication of a smart client user is handled directly by the Foundation security system. This can authenticate the user directly against an internal user database or against any authentication mechanism supported by the Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI). In the case of a login through the Web client, the authentication is performed by the Foundation after any additional authentication enforced by IIS is passed.

After initial authentication is performed by the Foundation security system, the Web application enforces authorisation for each request made to the server by ensuring that the correct rights are assigned to the current thread of execution. Transactional security is ensured through strong encryption and between physical tiers using either Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption or methods employed as part of the WS-Security standard.

Using the provided tools, administrators can create user groups to control access to modules and features, including business object and field-level security. By default the system promotes “least access” security, ensuring that only the minimum access necessary to perform an operation is granted, thus increasing data integrity by limiting access to the proper users.

Dashboards and Reporting

GMEE includes a powerful real-time reporting engine that is used to create customisable service views and give users of all levels roles-based views into the appropriate areas of the business.

Dashboard views consist of user-defined configurations of either system-supplied or custom Dashboard parts. A wide variety of dashboard components are included with each FrontRange module; however, customers can easily add or extend the included dashboard components to meet their specific needs.

Supported Dashboard components include:

Business Process Engine

GMEE includes a powerful business process engine based on the open Business Process Modelling Language (BPML) standard. This engine enables the execution of complex processes that may run for just a few seconds or for decades. Processes defined for the engine may engage in synchronous and asynchronous communications not only with the FrontRange Foundation, but also with any other system supporting a Web services–based interface. This allows complex processes spanning multiple business entities or applications to be easily constructed and deployed.

The construction of the BPML-compliant process is eased with the inclusion of a graphical process editor that allows the user to drag and drop process activities on a work space. The toolbox of available services is easily expandable by the importation of WSDL files, and any process can be exposed to the world as a Web service.

Records

Each time an account, contact, opportunity, or other entity is added to GMEE’s database, a record is created. These records are the basic building blocks from which all other information is generated and contains information, such as name, company, phone, and address. However, the amount of detail stored and tracked on each record is virtually unlimited as you customize GMEE for your organisation by creating new fields, entities, and relationships between them.

Relationship Management

GMEE’s Relationship Management module allows you to define the relationships between records, and between records and yourself, in very flexible ways that suit you.

Relationship Management includes tight integration with Microsoft Outlook calendaring and email capabilities. Users have the ability to schedule appointments, activities, and tasks or send email in Outlook and have them attached directly to Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities or any other business object.

Managing Activities

You can schedule, view, and complete activities in GMEE. Activities scheduled for a future date and time are stored as records in GMEE’s Calendar. Reminders and alerts keep you up to date. After calls are made, appointments kept, and messages received, the information transfers from the Calendar and the related module’s Pending tab to a History tab, where it is stored as a completed activity record.

You can view activities for users, user groups, for a particular date, or for a particular record. Use the Calendar to view activities by date, the Activity List to view by activity type, and the Pending tab on the Contact Record to view the contact’s activities for the contact.

Each activity record, whether still pending on the Calendar or completed in the history file, is directly linked to a specific record, for example an Opportunity Record or an Account Record. Connecting activities to these records establishes a relational link that you can use to track the progress of customer relationships.

You can manage your activities in GMEE or in Microsoft Outlook by using the GMEE/Outlook integration tool.

Managing Marketing Campaigns

GMEE provides features that enable you to target business opportunities using marketing campaigns. It enables you to create and monitor specific Marketing Campaigns, gather and follow Leads, and link the information to Opportunities, Contacts and Accounts.

Communicating with Others

Use GMEE to print correspondence, send e-mail, send pages, and distribute literature. GMEE integrates the functionality of your template and email software to communicate with contacts and colleagues. You can configure GMEE to perform these tasks in the GMEE Application Administrator.

Email

Use GMEE to retrieve and manage your Microsoft Outlook email. You can associate most email records from Microsoft Outlook to specific GMEE records.

Printing and Faxing Correspondence

GMEE works in conjunction with Microsoft Word to merge contact information from GMEE into templates, generating personalised correspondence. GMEE’s Document Management Centre provides a central location where you can access and manage your correspondence.