Wow, I can’t believe it has really only been 11 days since I’ve last posted! We are in budgeting season at Intuit, which is kind of like self-expanding foam… it consumes all available space.

One cool thing happened today that I have to share. Today was the review with my boss, our CTO, Bill Ihrie. (Next Friday is our CEO, so we’ll appreciate positive thoughts from y’all.) Bill’s great at asking all the tough questions, really digging into the details of the business and balancing "short and long", as we say here. The cool thing is that for those questions I didn’t know off the top of my head, many of them I could either answer quickly, because the info was in a QuickBase, or I could tell him I could send him access to a QuickBase that would give him the details.

One example is our marketing programs. As we continue to grow, our marketing programs grow too. Bill asked questions about the efficacy of those programs based on our growth. I knew the top level answers, because I’m updated regularly and proactively on our programs though our Marketing Programs QuickBase app, but also, the details needed are easily available directly to him, just by sharing the app with him. QuickBase gave me the confidence as a manager that I had both the high-level and the details in check… because I have the visibility I need, and the information "just in time".

OK, back to your regularly scheduled programming…

In the next major update to QuickBase one of the things I would like to address is the issue of how we set the FROM address for emails sent by QuickBase.

First some background.  All email messages contain 3 email addresses, the TO address, the FROM address and the REPLY-TO address.  The REPLY-TO is optional and most email clients will just use the FROM for replying if the REPLY-TO is absent.  A second bit of background is that an email address may contain text that is purely informational such as the full name of the user to whom the email is being sent.

Today QuickBase sends the following emails:

• Notifications
• View Subscriptions
• Reminders
• Email-a-record
• Email-a-view

In the first two cases we give you some control over the FROM address.  In the other cases we don’t.

This issue is whether the FROM address should be the email address of the actual sender or an email address from notify@quickbase.com that might look like this:

   fred_smith @ example.com (via quickbase) <notify@quickbase.com>

The reason for using the latter is that, more and more, email servers are rejecting as SPAM any incoming mail message that has a FROM address in the same email domain as what is normally sent out from that server.

So here is what I am proposing to do:  Email messages sent out from QuickBase will always come from notify@quickbase.com.  However, we will give you, the user, control over what appears in the informational part of the FROM address.  More importantly we will give you control over the REPLY-TO address.

But the biggest change is that we will remove these options from individual notifications, subscriptions, etc. and, instead, provide these options at the application level or even possibly at the Workgroup level.  My feeling is that this is a fairly technical configuration option that someone subscribing to a view isn’t necessarily going to have the expertise to understand.  Much more likely that the application/workgroup administrator will be able to make these decisions and that, in fact, this configuration should apply to all emails sent from that application/workgroup.

Comments?

Joe Rice
QuickBase Lead Designer | www.quickbase.com | Intuit - Waltham Office

Here is another installment in my occassional series of "secret" QuickBase UI tips.

When people ask me for help trying to do something in Windows, one of my most common pieces of advice is to "Click Right". As in, "click the right-hand mouse button." In Windows, this generally brings up a context menu of useful actions related to the thing you’ve clicked on.

This advice applies to QuickBase as well. In several places, we’ve replaced the browsers’ standard right click menu with a QuickBase-specific menu of shortcuts to common tasks. While there’s nothing on these menues that you can’t do in some other way, they can be a nice time-saver.

I think the most useful "right click" is on a field’s name in a form or a view. You need to have administrative access to the application. The resulting menu will let you edit that field’s properties or edit the form. Not only can this save time, it can help you avoid mistakes, especially in applications with lots of fields.

Other right click menues can be found in Grid Edit and on the My QuickBase page. These menues appear in both IE and Firefox.

Enjoy!

– Jim

P.S., Some people (including me at times) are annoyed that the standard
browser right click menu has been replaced. As you can guess, it’s a
trade off — we’re betting that the average user will get more benefit
from the custom QuickBase menu than the browser’s standard menu.

We are building a library of QuickBase applications, where users can  "check out" applications built by other QuickBase users. We are going to start the library based on applications that Intuit employees have built to accomplish their work, but we hope to get the greater community involved.

A recent Fast Company article covered a contest by Weldbond (glue) called "You Glued What?". (The examples given are amusing!) It reminded me of our continued amazement at what you all build in QuickBase, and I thought, maybe these two ideas should be combined. Should we have a "You Built What?" contest to launch our library?

I’m Peter Fearey; I manage our awesome engineering and product management team members. I’d love to hear some of your ideas about something. Over the last few weeks I’ve had some great customer conversations. One thing that has become apparent to me is that customers with a large number of users often develop their own internal QuickBase community. Here are some examples:

• One customer puts a "feedback" table into all their applications so that users of the application can provide the application managers with feedback.

• Another customer has a QuickBase application that all users and application managers use as a central "QuickBase help desk".

• Another customer has a quarterly meeting where all the application managers get together and share tips and tricks.

I believe the benefits of this kind of community are huge:

• Users and application managers learn from each other

• People could leverage each others work and share ideas

…the question just becomes…what should we do about it? And that’s where I’d like to ask for your help:

1. If you are developing a QuickBase community among your users and application managers, what has been successful and what hasn’t?

2. What would be your top three list of things we could do to help you in building community at your site, including product features, newsletters, customer stories, application libraries, etc.?