by Peter Fearey under QuickBase News

It is with great pride that I share with you that QuickBase was selected as Best Business Software Product or Service by the Software and Information Industry Association. In this 20th year for the association’s "Codie" awards, there were a record number of nominees. In January, we were proud to have been selected a Codie finalist by industry experts, including Marc Cohen and Mark Oleesky from KABC Computer and Technology Show; David English, a well known technology writer; Frank Ohlhorst, Technology Editor and Test Center Director for CMP Media; and David Coursey eWeek columnist and technology event consultant. Now, we are honored to have been selected a winner by the general membership of the association… our peers in the industry. This is a great honor and kudos to the QuickBase team!

by Peter Fearey under Industry Trends

I spent the last week at an industry conference sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association. The Enterprise Software Summit section of the conference centered around two topics: open source and software-as-a-service (SaaS). One major theme was that SaaS was increasingly becoming a strategic answer because IT departments didn’t listen and enterprise software is bloated. One the one hand, with QuickBase being an SaaS, I guess this is good news. However, being a techie, I don’t like either message. The first says that technical folks can’t "hear" business talk, and the second says that software vendors can’t "hear" their customers. Ugh… the first "trend" is something that I could talk about for hours, but will spare you. The second is more appropriate for this blog.

In my (humble) opinion, the challenge isn’t the platform (i.e., SaaS vs. installed software), but the way we approach software in general. SaaS vendors are just younger, thus haven’t experience bloat… yet. I see the push to bloat every day. And, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the QuickBase engineering team in the way they handle that push. They hear customers and want to respond to their needs, but often the requests make the software harder to use. The art is when you can both respond to the needs and continue to have easy-to-use, easy-to-understand software. Maybe I can coax one of the engineers to discuss a problem like this, so you can see the struggle in action, but in general, please tell us where you think we are doing well on this front, and where we aren’t!

by Alex Chriss under Industry Trends

Hi Everybody – I’m Alex Chriss, and I lead the Application Specialists, Customer Advocates and Marketing teams for QuickBase. I’m pretty sure I have the best job in the world – where else do you get to spend all day having Customer’s call you up telling you they couldn’t survive without your product. Pretty darn cool!

So a few thoughts from recent customer interactions…When a new potential customer comes to us, they are usually looking for a specific application to solve a specific problem.  In Sales, we want to help them quickly deliver that application but more importantly we want them to achieve their "QuickBase A-Ha" moment – you know, that explosion in your brain when you realize the power and flexibility of all the amazing things you can do in QuickBase.

My "moment" occurred the first time I embedded a “Sales activity” View in a “Customer account” Record.  There was something about seeing all of my sales activities sorted and grouped, embedded RIGHT THERE on the Customer record that made me stop, tighten my embrace on the coffee mug, and realize that QuickBase could probably take me as far as my imagination would go.

But then again, I had a customer sign up for service yesterday who’s moment occurred when she understood that the options for matching criteria in a View was every single one of the fields she had just created.  She had to take a moment and absorb the fact that she had complete control over her data and could now run instant reports on anything her heart desired.  As she was giggling with delight – all I could think of was “Welcome”.

So…what I want to know is when was your "A-Ha" moment?  Maybe if we see a pattern it will help us direct new customers to the right places as fast as possible. A-Haaaaaa…..

by jsalem under QuickBase News

QuickBase has won yet another PC Magazine Editor’s Choice award, receiving the highest score in the magazine’s review of Workgroup Databases in the June issue (page 139).

"With a strong emphasis on letting business managers, instead of IT departments, design and use powerful, Web-based, hosted workgroup applications, the newest version of QuickBase continues to impress with a mix of a slick user interface and surprising depth."

It’s nice to see the editors recognize the power that QuickBase puts into the hands of every day application users.

by Peter Fearey under Customer Stories

I’m an optimist; it is a natural disposition. Why is that important to you? I want to make sure that you know, despite my overall sunny outlook in this blog, our team takes it seriously when we’ve missed the mark or screwed up. I’m hoping these two customer stories will encourage you to tell us both the good and the bad … we listen.

First, a customer — one impacted by a screw up on our side a few months ago actually — sent me this story last week:

I configured a QuickBase application to track our annual IT budget, including projects and approved budget items. With this application, we will know where we are with the budget at all times.

The best part – it only took me a couple of hours, while a team of spreadsheet experts hadn’t figured out where to start. When I presented this to my boss, he was so excited he could not stay in his seat.

[Side question: How do you get across to people you can do something like this with QuickBase -- something that would have taken them days, weeks, even sometimes months to do in the past in hours?]

While stories like this provide the team energy, where that energy goes is working on fixing stories like this…

On Friday, a customer, desperate to find anyone who could help, got stuck with me as her help provider. She was frustrated and angry by not being able to modify “how things list out” before a meeting with her boss. The problem took about two minutes to handle over the phone; it wasn’t complex. This shouldn’t have taken so much work on her part. She had tried to read the help and the knowledge base, tried to click on every button and link, etc.

The problem boiled down to her not understanding two basic database structures: fields and forms. Since a core value of QuickBase is to allow business users — even those who do not speak database — to create, modify and support applications that enable them to get work done, we are missing the mark here. To reach our potential on this core value, we need to make these concepts more… well, INTUITive. We are working on it.

by Peter Fearey under Uncategorized

You know, I started posting to this blog without introducing myself, because I felt as if it would let me talk to you, our customers, more regularly. The “more regularly” part implied that I already talk with you somewhat regularly. Well, yesterday, after I presented our quarterly results to the QuickBase team, I realized, based on our customer growth, many folks reading this wouldn’t know me after all. While I’m delighted with our growth, it also makes me sigh. I love knowing our customers well. I love being able to punctuate my conversations with examples drawn from real people, with real problems solved, and real problems not (yet) solved! I hope this blog helps me connect with that growing list of people important to us… you! Please post your comments; I’ll be reading each one.

With that, let me introduce myself. I’m Jana Eggers, the general manager of QuickBase. I campaigned for this job, as I have a passion for QuickBase. I’m an old programmer (couldn’t call myself an engineer, as I wasn’t that eloquent, nor a hacker, as I wasn’t that creative), who went to "the dark side", a.k.a., the business side, after leaving research science. The techie in me has incredible respect for what QuickBase accomplishes technically, and the business side of me sees the tremendous value of putting the “programming” in the hands of mere mortals. Business users can “develop” an application that perfectly fits their situation, within a timeframe their understandable impatience will tolerate.  Dan Gerawan, president of Gerawan Farming, a large international grower and marketer of stone fruit, said it so well:

Our own team leaders built our application in a week, without any programmers – saving tens of thousands of dollars in development costs. The result is a system that required little training, launched bug-free, and had acceptance on day one.

That’s why I’m here. What about you?

by jsalem under Uncategorized

I’ve talked with many of you over the years. I’ve learned a lot about how to improve QuickBase from you and you’ve told me how you’ve appreciated hearing from members of the QuickBase team.

Via this blog, we hope to reach out to more of you. We’ll let you know our thoughts about QuickBase, about where we are headed, about little known tips and tricks, and show you a little of what goes on "behind the scenes." The blog won’t substitute for our online support, knowledge base, and help documentation. However, it will give you a more well-rounded view of the product and the team behind it. 

I hope you enjoy our musings. Leave some comments to let us know what you think.