You see that big fat red X, don’t you? Just hanging out on the toolbar, dying to be clicked. You know, the Delete button…
I still can’t believe they put it right on the dashboard like that. It’s crazy. Let me explain:
- Deleting in GoldMine is PERMANENT. There is no undo, unless you count the IT guy and a (hopefully good) backup.
- Deleted records do us no good. I understand if a record is out-and-out “bad”, but “inactive” Contact Records should be set to some kind Discarded Status. And then, archived to another Contact Set. MS-CRM understands this perfectly.
My humble recommendations for dealing with Inactive Contact records:
- Create a new Contact Type value of “Dead” or “Discard” and use this value for the records in question.
- Create another Contact Set called “Archive” and Copy/Move the record to it. (Tools | Data Management | Copy/Move Records)
- If you must Delete, I recommend setting a field somewhere to “DEL” (like Ext3) and then deleting all the “DEL”‘s after the fact. It’s another level of shortstop between you and certain doom.
Fun fact: We recently had a client lose a 15 year old contact record because someone deleted it and didn’t catch it until one week after. The backup only caught seven days. They actually lost the record forever. All that history, all those notes.
So I guess the moral of the story is “measure twice, cut once”.
