by jrice under Uncategorized

In the upcoming update to QuickBase we’ve made some changes to the MyQuickBase page that we want to make you aware of.  If you’re the manager of a QuickBase application at your site, you may, in turn, want to make your users aware of these changes so they’re not too surprised on the Monday morning after our next software update.

Most of the changes that you’ll notice right away are cosmetic.  While not the driving reason to make changes to the MyQuickBase page, we did take this opportunity to clean the page up a bit and, hopefully, improving the layout.

What really drove this redesign was performance.  We wanted the MyQuickBase page to be faster for users with access to many QuickBases.  So most of the important changes are internal.  For instance, if you have access to multiple QuickBases, sorting the list of applications now takes place "client-side" (in the browser) rather than making a request back to the QuickBase server and having the QuickBase server return a new page.  Likewise, if you assign categories to applications or hide applications, the results are instantaneous.

Another consideration in the redesign was to make the page simpler for first-time users.  First-time users typically have access to a small number of QuickBase applications.  The extra columns for Last Visited and Manager aren’t particularly relevant and make the screen a bit harder to digest.  Likewise categorizing applications isn’t very important when a user only has access to a few. So the MyQuickBase page has two modes now: Simple Display and Detailed display.  Simple Display is the default for new users and is shown below:

To toggle between these two modes, use the menu that appears when you click on the Applications heading above the list of applications.

This menu is the biggest functional change.  Notice that there is no longer an "I want to…" menu.  If you use categories on your MyQuickBase page, you’ll notice that that menu is also gone.  Both have been combined into a single menu that is reached by clicking on the Applications heading above the list of applications.  In Simple mode, this menu is likewise simple.  It only lets you go to Detailed mode or search for an application.  In Detailed mode this menu allows you to show work with categories and clear flags as well.  The menu and Detailed mode look like this:

Right-clicking on an application in the list of applications, is still the way to set categories, hide applications, and delete applications.

One important thing to note is that Simple/Detailed mode is sticky.  When you switch to Simple or Detailed mode, QuickBase will remember the mode the next time you come back to your MyQuickBase page.  So don’t worry that you’ll have to constantly switch between modes.

These changes are a relatively minor part of our next update but because of the high visibility of the MyQuickBase page, we did want to make you aware before the release to give you an opportunity to make your users aware.

Hope this is helpful,
Joe

by jsalem under Uncategorized

I’m talking about your application’s front page. What we currently call an Overview page. We’ve seen some wonderful customizations to these pages to turn them into true application dashboards that include key views, links to specific tasks, and documentation on how to use the app. For our next release, we’re making it easier to create and modify these pages and to add your own rich HTML content.

For those of you who’ve already customized your overview page to make it the centerpeice of your application, I’m curious what you’ve put on there.  What’s the key info you want your end users to see when they arrive at that page? What are the top two or three links you have (or would like to have) front and center?

Also, we’re planning to change the name of "Overview" pages within the product to "Dashboards." We think this will better convey their purpose, especially the direction we’re headed with them. Although "dashboard" sounds a little more "business-speak" than I’d like, the term seems to have gained some currency.  What do you think?

BTW, this name change will only be visible to application administrators. End-users will continue to just see the page’s heading which you can change by clicking on the "Customize this Page" link.

by Peter Fearey under QuickBase Advice & Tips

As you can imagine, we are all asked all the time how we use QuickBase, so consider this post one in a series that discusses how we use our own product in day-to-day business.

E-mail notifications and subscriptions are hands down my favorite feature of QuickBase. While in general, I am anti-"more e-mail", QuickBase brings good e-mail to my inbox… RELEVANT e-mail. To give you an idea, I get e-mail that:

• When it happens, tells me we closed a deal, with whom, and for what use!
• When it happens, tells me when a support case is assigned to me.
• When it happens, shows me Community Forum questions.
• When it happens, tells me when a service patch date is set.
• Daily, tells me any support cases I need to handle.
• Daily, tells me what our PR team is expecting from me.
• Daily, gives me a review of our last 15 days of Operations stats.
• Semi-weekly, gives me new customer reports.
• Weekly, summarizes roadblocks customers encountered.
• Weekly, summarizes support cases.

I could go on for awhile, but you get the picture. The best part about these emails is that they are targeted just for me. For example, our operations (systems performance, requests handled, incidents, response times, etc.) are critical for our service. The report has row colorization that tells me if we exceeded any thresholds. (I, our Ops team, and our Eng team gets paged real time for an issue, but this report helps us back up and see any trends). I’m aging, so I can’t remember every detail of our ops. So, one day when looking at a report, I had to ask "why" a certain value was over threshold. Well, that got the "Ops Notes" column added to the report, which is where we make notes so we know if we expected a value to be above threshold for maintenance or other reasons.

This is why I love these emails… if I have to ask a question, most often, that can be added to the email and then I don’t have to ask again. They are reports for me. (Or whoever else defines them.) Because of this, they are more relevant, and they help me stay on top of this business.

I’ve had customers and partners be impressed with how much we know about our business. The reason for me is that our product itself helps us stay on top of the business. Seeing emails during the day as things happen, reviewing a few every morning and each week… it keeps you on top of things and NO ONE is spending time building special reports daily, weekly or monthly for me to keep updated. I love that!

If you haven’t yet discovered their power, here’s a basic intro to e-mail notifications:

https://www.quickbase.com/db/93htvp8y?a=dr&r=bj&rl=jkn

If you have discovered their power, please share with other users how you are using e-mail notifications to make your job easier.

by emccann under QuickBase Advice & Tips

Are you currently in trial or an existing customer looking for some additional tips and tricks on how to get up and running even faster? 

You can easily access our library of short demonstrations highlighting specific featues and topics by going to https://www.quickbase.com/db/93htvp8y?a=q&qid=16.