GoldMine’s search centre lets you build complex search terms very easily, using any field in the database, and is a quick and easy alternative to using the filter builder.

The Owner field presents its own challenges though, and there is a definite inconsistency between how it’s represented in the two places.

Searching for records that are owned by an individual user presents no problems, but things are very different when records are owned by user groups.

User groups have a name that is presented to the user (eg ‘sales’) but a slightly different representation internally. Each user group is prefaced with a number, and the name may be truncated compared to what the user sees. In this example, the group’s internal representation may be something like ’13sales’.

When using the filter builder, or lookup.ini, or doing a global replace, you have to know, and use, the internal name – the best ways to find this out are either a) put the owner field onto the record or b) add owner to the set of columns in the search centre and look at it that way.

When searching by owner in the search centre though, GoldMine tries to be helpful and takes the name as it’s normally seen by the user (so, ‘sales’ in this example).

It’s an inconsistency that can easily catch you out.