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How I Use QuickBase: E-Mail Notifications

By Peter Fearey | Posted on May 8th, 2006

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.

About Peter Fearey

http://www.netg.com/interactnow Murali Balathandapani

We have event quickbase database, we love to send a iCal or vCal whenever events created or changed. It’ll be great if we could do that. Pls let me know. Thx.

[Reply]
http://www.netg.com/interactnow Murali Balathandapani

We have event quickbase database, we love to send a iCal or vCal whenever events created or changed. It’ll be great if we could do that. Pls let me know. Thx.

[Reply]
http://www.quickbase.com/ Jana

Hi, Murali,

Yes, we agree this is a good feature, and have already started talking about it. Can you tell us more about what you would want? Would it be an iCal/vCal for any update that has a date in it? Are time ranges important? Are they just certain notifications, so you want to be able to select this to be an “Cal” notification?

Any other specifics would help us get out the right feature for you.

Thanks,
Jana

[Reply]
http://www.quickbase.com Jana

Hi, Murali,

Yes, we agree this is a good feature, and have already started talking about it. Can you tell us more about what you would want? Would it be an iCal/vCal for any update that has a date in it? Are time ranges important? Are they just certain notifications, so you want to be able to select this to be an “Cal” notification?

Any other specifics would help us get out the right feature for you.

Thanks,
Jana

[Reply]
Mathew

How can I use the email notification like a user subscription service. I want users to be notified on articles that get posted in the QB that they are interested in and have ‘subscribed’ to the subject area.

[Reply]
Mathew

How can I use the email notification like a user subscription service. I want users to be notified on articles that get posted in the QB that they are interested in and have ‘subscribed’ to the subject area.

[Reply]
http://www.mos.org/ Larry Koolkin

In addition to the kinds of reminders described above, we have built a ‘general purpose Tickler File’ application. This allows any of our users to add records along with a ‘remind me by’ date — and the application makes use of EMail reminders to notify/remind the users.

Living in the same application are some specialized subsets of Tickler records, such as for tracking/handling ‘approvals’. This is a variant where more than one party is involved in reviewing and signing-off that something is ‘approved’, with one of the parties often being an external vendor. The same Email techniques are used to remind either/both parties involved that something requiring approval has been added, or an existing (but as yet unapproved) one requires attention.

[Reply]
http://www.mos.org Larry Koolkin

In addition to the kinds of reminders described above, we have built a ‘general purpose Tickler File’ application. This allows any of our users to add records along with a ‘remind me by’ date — and the application makes use of EMail reminders to notify/remind the users.

Living in the same application are some specialized subsets of Tickler records, such as for tracking/handling ‘approvals’. This is a variant where more than one party is involved in reviewing and signing-off that something is ‘approved’, with one of the parties often being an external vendor. The same Email techniques are used to remind either/both parties involved that something requiring approval has been added, or an existing (but as yet unapproved) one requires attention.

[Reply]
http://sites.google.com/site/bestwrinklescream376/wrinkles-cream---why-is-this-method-more-beneficial Makayla

Thanks for this is a great and informative post, Regards, a 51 year old reader.

[Reply]
http://sites.google.com/site/bestwrinklescream376/wrinkles-cream---why-is-this-method-more-beneficial Makayla

Thanks for this is a great and informative post, Regards, a 51 year old reader.

[Reply]

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