OrgCharts (Relationships)
A Typical GoldBox-produced OrgChart (from GoldMine 6.7) Note the 4 Levels, with the Contact
being linked at the bottom (4th) Level. Also note that:

  • Multiple fields may be used at each Level (like State/City)
  • Conditional logic is available (like using Country when the State field is empty)
  • The total number of Contacts in the OrgChart (in this case, for a given Company) is
    displayed to the right of the Top OrgChart record.
Some background on OrgCharts: While they were introduced before 1997 (GoldMine 3.2) as manually
constructed "trees", "OrgCharts" have never been "true" Organizational Charts. They simply lack the
flexibility for "horizontal downlegs" to be able to accurately represent the structure of any but the tiniest of
companies.

But that doesn't mean they are useless, by any means. They are most often used to give GoldMine
Users a "feel' for how a company is laid out, including employees' general areas of responsibility. But it
took the advent of automated OrgChart production (introduced by GoldBox in 1997 with 2 Level
capability) to really begin to get the most imaginative uses for OrgCharts. For example, if you had the
data available, you could make a "Customer Chart", broken down by State/City, or even types of products
purchased. Still, such Relational Charts (for that is what they really are) were considered mere
curiosities by most.

Around 2000, GoldMine added Replication capabilities to OrgCharts. Blocks of fields could be replicated
from one Contact in a Chart to all the others. While Replication could be dangerous in the wrong hands,
it did pinpoint a way in which OrgCharts could be leveraged. But Automated OrgCharts did not follow up
on this capability; it was seen as too difficult to do to be practical (at least, until recently).

Enter GoldBox's NEW type of automated OrgChart, based on GoldBox Views technology, in 2003. This
has a 4-Level capability; a test mode; the ability to insert security; it is the future of OrgCharts for
GoldMine. Or perhaps I should say, the future of Relationships, because that is the new name for
OrgCharts in GoldMine Premium Edition. But GoldBox 7 is right there, ready to make them sing with PE.
Originally, I did not expect to include a page devoted to OrgCharts on this site. However, due to some
recent work (both by GoldBox and by myself), the subject has gotten more interesting.

Specifically, GoldBox's Virtual Org Chart Builder has been enhanced in a number of ways:

Each level break can now be an expression of variable evaluated length. This opens the door to
advanced sorting options, even including sorts that exceed the displayable length of the
GoldMine value Org Chart record.
Break expressions can also include GoldBox's Smooth functions, so some Members who might
otherwise have been omitted from the Chart will automatically be included.
GoldBox-created Org Charts now display a Count of the number of records in the Chart, at the
end of the Top Level record.

For my part, the ability to do automated Replication within OrgCharts has been developed. This goes
beyond the Main Contact field Replication that GoldMine offers (on a manual basis only). For example,
with OrgChart Replication powered by GoldBox, it is possible to detect the most recent History record
within all the Members of an OrgChart, and to propagate specific data from that History record to UDFs
(or even Details or other kinds of records) for all the members of that OrgChart...and all the OrgCharts in
the database!  

However, I must point out that the purpose of such Replication is normally to propagate "Company" data
to the Contact records of an Org Chart in a database that is built on the Contact-centric model. While I
can furnish such Replication, I would urge anyone to give pause before going in that direction. I am
writing a paper that explains why, and I'll include a link to it here when it is complete.