Building GoldMine Relationship Trees

The relationship trees in GoldMine are a potentially very useful feature. They allow you to set up a visual representation of the relationships between different contacts. You can, for example, show all the people that work for a particular company; or perhaps all the people from different organisations that are assisting on a particular project.

A problem with using relationship trees is that GoldMine offers very limited support for building them. The GoldMine wizard allows you to specify a single field to use as the basis for deciding if a contact should be in one tree or another. So you can build a tree based on the company name, which gets you all the contacts for that company. But what if you want to also sort the contacts by city or state? Or if you are looking for a more complex relationship between different types of contacts, such as brokers, properties, and prospective purchasers?

As soon as you need to consider more than one field, or want to do something slightly more complex, you are forced to build the trees manually.

Manually building trees is a difficult process for all but the smallest data sets. There are several problems:

1. The labor involved in building all the trees initially

2. Ensuring accuracy

3. Maintaining the trees once built, as records are added, updated or deleted.

As an earlier post noted, Inaport provides a relationship tree builder that addresses all these issues. It allows you to model simple or complex multi-level trees; once the model is built, you can build the tree and re-build at any time, or schedule the tree to be re-built regularly.

New video available

The relationship tree builder in Inaport has recently been updated, and a video describing and demonstrating its use is available here.

The video shows how to design and build a relationship tree showing the relationships between contact records for real estate properties, units within each property, and tenants in each unit. An example of the kind of tree than can be built is shown in the screen shot below.

Example Relationship Tree built using Inaport