As some of you know, we fairly regularly make small updates
to the QuickBase service. These are what the software industry generally terms
"patches", i.e., they are small fixes.  At your request, we’ll start
updating this blog with information on those patches. Here’s the first one… 

Last Friday, along with some performance enhancements, and
minor bug fixes, we threw in an enhancement to the Customize Roles
functionality.  Now, when you select Customize Roles from the Manage Users menu,
you will notice a new tabbed interface, as well as some new options on the User
Interface tab: 

• We have added
  options for hiding tables from the menu bar and “Add record” elements from your
  QuickBase application on a per role basis.
• We have given
  application developers the ability to limit users from performing multi-record
  operations such as grid-edit, search and replace and Import.

Note:

• These options do
  not affect the table and record access permissions of the role. If you do want to
  control the user’s access permissions, you will still need to define them
  through the Permissions tab.
• If a user is
  assigned multiple roles, the above options will
  follow the role order precedence defined in the Reorder Roles screen.

For more
information, please refer to the QuickBase help topics about configuring the
QuickBase interface elements at https://www.quickbase.com/help/configure_role_permissions.html#interface
and defining role order precedence at
https://www.quickbase.com/help/reordering_role_priorities.html.

Robert McDonald
QuickBase Product Manager

New to the QuickBase marketing team, I’m Liz McCann and am focused on driving more attention to the QuickBase product. Based on feedback from folks wanting new ideas on how to use QuickBase, we are having our first Webinar that highlights a great example of how Intuit uses QuickBase. We’d like to invite you to join us. See the announcement below for more information and please continue sending us more ideas!

With over 7,000 employees across 49 sites, tracking Intuit’s contributions to our various communities means tracking over 35% employee participation, over 17,0000 volunteer hours, over $180,000 in grants, over $1 million in donations and matching, and innumerable in-kind and product donations. To track the company’s contributions, Jenna Mahina runs this program "like a business", which means with trackable processes, fast and accurate reporting, and most important, a clear view of accomplishments. After looking at specialty applications which cost between $50,000 to $100,000, Jenna decided she could get just what she needed by using QuickBase.

On Wednesday, February 1st at 2pm EST, Jana Eggers, General Manager for QuickBase and Jenna will be coming together to share Jenna’s success story in a live webinar session.

To register for the webinar you can go to the following url: https://www.quickbase.com/db/ba862t3m7?a=GenNewRecord 

Getting people to change how they do their job is hard- people don’t like change.  Yet, every QuickBase application creator is faced with the fact that they need to change people’s behavior in order to drive end user acceptance and adoption of their specific application.   What amazes me is that we constantly hear about people’s successes here and how they were able to get 100 people to happily change to QuickBase "overnight".  That brings me to some questions I’ve wanted to ask for a long time:
- What are some techniques you all use to drive adoption (e.g. users manuals,  training, "manager mandates") and of all the different things you’ve tried, what’s worked best?
- What are the barriers new users have and that make adoption hard? 
- What is the one thing that you believe we could do to make the entire process of rolling out an application to a team easier?

I guess what it all boils down to is that we know how important user adoption is when rolling out an application and we’d love to hear about what your best practices are.  As you might imagine, getting the rest of the QuickBase team to use the product or a new application doesn’t end up being that hard for us so this isn’t something we have to grapple with  much:->

On the QuickBase team, support is a team effort. We have leads that triage and handle the bulk of the cases, but we all take support cases handling different areas of expertise. My area is usually on things like compliance or legal questions, as well as handling folks that have gotten really mad. (I don’t want to see any of you there!) While it can get stressful at times to juggle support and other priorities, it does also keep us in touch with customers, which we all appreciate and hope you do too.

With that as a backdrop, when I look at the complaints about QuickBase support the two main buckets are:

1.  I want better answers to my questions.

2.  I need an answer immediately.

Let’s work together on the first one to get it off the list. The best way to improve answers is to give us more in the question. Even for a simple case like "How do I calculate how many days a task is open?", often there are multiple answers. In this case, the customer was using the number of days a task in some baseline calculations, which meant it made sense to set the calculation up to return a number, rather than a duration.

Understanding the specific business problems you are solving gives us a huge leap forward in giving you the information you need to get QuickBase dancing to your drum beat.

Another quick hit: Telling us what you have tried helps us gauge where you are with your QuickBase understanding. Sometimes, folks find our answers to assume too much knowledge, and sometimes too little. So, in the example above, it helped to know that the customer had tried several formulas and what the results had been in trying those.

Does this make sense? Think we can solve this one together?

As for #2, first thing is noting the word choice. I used "need" instead of "want" for this. I’m talking about the situations where you really need an answer immediately, and waiting even an hour, much less a day, won’t work.

From what we’ve seen, typically "need" happens because something is blocking your use of QuickBase. One cool idea given to us for this was a status hotline. If, for example, our monitoring (that “uses” QuickBase from across the country) found an issue with access from the MidWest, we would update the hotline to tell you that we’ve seen and what is happening around it. If you saw an issue, you could call the hotline for a report of any incidents have been reported, so you know status.

Other ideas, or examples of where companies have done this well?

I also want your thoughts on "want" too, but "need" as higher priority, as I think you would agree.

P.S. I’d feel remiss if I didn’t point you to some suggestions in case you feel like you are having an access/performance problem. Check out: https://www.quickbase.com/db/8emtadvk?a=dr&r=yyz&rl=bedc

I’m curious how many folks are browsing to this blog (pull) vs. using a feed reader (push). A show of hands? Either way, how many other blogs are you reading or feeds are you tracking? What do you like about those? What do you dislike?

And the big question, what about adding feed production capabilities to QuickBase? Would you like that ability in addition to the email notification, view subscription, and reminder capabilities? How do you envision using it? Similar to those, or do different things come to mind?

I’ll admit that I’m kind of a feed reading junkie, so I’m curious where others stand… THANKS!

P.S. For those not into feed reading yet. Here are some resources if you want to learn:

• Surf’s Down as More Netizens Turn to RSS for Browsing
  An older article, but one that has some good points about some WHY behind feed reading, and some ideas about what’s missing.
• Getting Started with RSS: The Fifteen-Minute Tutorial
• RSS Compendium - RSS Readers

I hope you noticed recently that our help and other documentation (like our Knowledge Base) are getting some great attention. You can thank one of our newest team members, Jessica Mantaro, for this.

As Jessica has helped us build out a strategy for "user content" (a broader category than just help), one of the things we’ve been bouncing around is creating "the" manual for getting started (and keeping going) with QuickBase. As opposed to help, which serves a needed purpose as a reference, this manual would be more of a workbook/action planner. For example, the chapters might be something like:

1. Top 5 concepts to get you grounded, and the exercises to prove that you are.
2. Decomposing your problem into QuickBase.
3. Building your first application that other people actually use.
4. Taking a step back to realize what you’ve just accomplished and what it means.
5. Advanced features for the curious and the geek in all of us.

A few questions for you on this…

• The easiest question… what do you think of the outline above? It is high level, but right now, I’m not so much worried about being on the same page, but being in the same book. (Sorry, I couldn’t help that little pun.)
• What do you think of online manuals versus printed? Where have you seen online manuals implemented well, and where poorly?
• The above is geared more to app builders, what about your end users? What topics are most important for them to get in order to make your life easier?
• And the last quick question I have… and this one sounds a little strange to ask, so let me explain first. QuickBase is not in the business of publishing content, so it is possible that we’d partner with someone to deliver this. If it were online specifically, there is an opportunity to deliver something that’s got more life in it, i.e., updated regularly with more and more info. What kinds of things would you want to see from content like this that was provided as a subscription service? For example, regular brain teasers, case studies, tips and tricks, developer Q&A, etc. What would provide you with the most value to you?

As always, thanks for your thoughts!

Hi Everyone,
I am one of the engineers on the QuickBase team and I thought I would share with you an app that I created which uses the Google Map API. Very briefly, the way I use the Google API is to store the piece of code in a QuickBase db page and reference the page using a URL formula. The formula passes in the latitude and longitude as well as some other inputs.

We are interested in finding out …

i) if anyone has felt the need to explore integrating Google maps with QuickBase. If so, what was the need and how have you solved it?

ii) what QuickBase features do people think would be useful in the context of using Google maps.  One obvious feature that I’ve heard from people is to be able to provide addresses (as opposed to latitude and longitude pairs) that can be fed to the Google map API to draw the maps. To the best of my knowledge, Google does not offer this yet.

Here is the link to the QuickBase app that I have created.

https://www.quickbase.com/db/bazk8i2wa

Enjoy!

Soumya