by Peter Fearey under QuickBase News

OK, I admit it… I’m a techie and a [press] flack. I love following what reporters are following, understanding how they are thinking about products, the industry, etc. I don’t just do it for products where I have a vested interested to be clear; I’m fascinated with how others view our products/industry, specifically compared to how the industry sees itself.

Oh, yeah, I was talking about QuickBase right? QuickBase and customer use of QuickBase got some press mentions recently. This morning, CIO Magazine covered Isis Pharmaceuticals use of QuickBase in an article on end-user development: Making It On Their Own. In PC Magazine’s database round-up (not online yet, in the June 7th print edition), we won Editors’ Choice and the highest "score". Now, this on top of coverage over the last few weeks in Fortune (sign-in required), CRM Magazine, and CMO Magazine (sign-in required). How many products can run across that range of publications? After the critical components (the value QuickBase provides, the fact that customers constantly teach us more about how it can be used, and the awesome team behind the product), I love working with a product that provides a constant array of cool press opportunities… from Girl Scout cookie ordering and delivery to SOX compliance to employee recruiting. How cool is that?

by Peter Fearey under Industry Trends

So, we are struggling with help. Just like when people ask me “What is QuickBase” and I answer “It depends. What do you do?”, when a “How do I…?” question comes, the answer typically is “It depends. What are you doing?” How do we structure help to answer this need?

Matt Hart, one of our Intuit Innovation Lab gurus, has been promoting Wiki technology, and, in particular, noted that many open source camps use this technology for help documentation. We are thinking that Wikis could provide us with an answer to our dilemma. The community would be able to collaborate and build out the help documentation with examples based on each of their specific applications. This means that help would not have the one answer on how we imagined a QuickBase feature could be used, but the “complete” answer on how the community has actually used a feature.

I’m thinking that with our active and knowledgeable forum community, this might really work for us. But what’s more important is what you think. Have you used Wikis before? Do you think this could work? Would you participate?

by Peter Fearey under Customer Stories

Two recent customer comments struck me as concise statements on what we are trying to accomplish with QuickBase. Let’s start with the comments:

"There are two things in life I don’t worry about… QuickBase and Tivo (R)… neither has ever let me down!"

"Wish our phone system worked as well as QuickBase."

Both are about reliability, but different types. The first is about reliability of the product working in the way a user expects. Tivo is a consumer product… it has to be simple to appeal to the millions of consumers as targets. When was the last time that you heard business software being compared to a consumer product? [Hmmmmm... maybe when Intuit came out with QuickBooks?] This quote validates the focus the team has had on keeping QuickBase as easy as possible. We aren’t declaring victory (being easy is hard!), but it is nice to have some feedback that we are on the right path.

The second is about reliability in the sense of actually "being there". As a Web-based, hosted product, we have a higher burden than desktop software to just be there. To be compared favorably to a phone system, arguably one of the most critical systems in business today, also provides positive feedback for the team. This means we are meeting a higher standard than just your typical business software. We are narrowing in on our goal of being as reliable as electricity… you flip the switch and you know we’ll be there!

by jsalem under QuickBase Advice & Tips

QuickBase has a number of "lightly documented" features that can save you time.

One I use all the time is the date entry keyboard shortcuts.  We use the same short cuts as Quicken:

• t – enter today’s date
• ] – next day
• [ – previous day

These can be used for entering dates in any field that is a date type.

by jsalem under Uncategorized

I’m really excited about the new Grid Editing feature in this release. One common use of QBase is to replace the "spreadsheet shuffle". Now we can replace that endless emailing of spreadsheets (and the asking of "Who has the latest copy?") with a single shared database that is just as easy to edit.

Joe did an awesome job implementing it — I haven’t seen anything else like it on the web! Let us know what you think.