With the latest release, we published the QuickBase Application Library.  Special thanks to all of the Intuit employees who shared their creations as well as the beta customers that submitted applications: Larry Koolkin, Kristina Davis, Spencer Lloyd, and Patti Dornacker.  If you have an app, you should share it as well!  We want the library to grow and become even more useful, and it’s relatively easy to submit (and will get easier).

There have been hundreds of installs since its release.  Now, we’re considering what to do next, so I’d love to get your feedback.

• What are your general impressions of the library?  How should we improve it?  Is anything confusing?
• What are your thoughts on submitting apps?  Do you plan to share?
• Similarly, what are your thoughts on reviewing/rating apps?  Do you plan to rate apps that you’ve installed?
• Do we need more complex, professional templates?  More examples of advanced features?  More reusable, single tables? Or just more apps period?

WOW, I’ve been staring at the screen for about two hours tonight. As the subject line suggests, I’m heading off on a new adventure. I knew this day would come; I’m an early stage gal. But, I’ve never been this passionate about a product and its opportunity; a team and the company behind them; and you — our customers and supporting ecosystem. There have been so many times that I wanted to reach out and hug you all, because of the way you’ve supported us as we grew up.

You’ll continue to see me on the community forum, and perhaps I’ll even find a chance to post a note or two here to fill you in on how I’m using QuickBase as the CEO of a growing company. Liz has made me promise to share a customer success story. The sales team is competing over who will get the commission on my account. And, the customer advocate, product management and engineering teams are concerned about who will be covering my support cases. But, short and sweet… Thank you all for three years of bliss!!!

(And, credit to Semisonic for giving me a fitting good-bye subject line.)

You might be wondering what the QuickBase team does to release a new version. I can give you a peek from my perspective…

Late this evening, many of us returned before our 11:00p cutover to get ready… Some dilligent folks in QA and Operations were working straight through…

While we were waiting for the appointed time, we had a ceremonial bug bashing (That’s Jana swinging the bat):

At 11:00, the Ops guys did a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure QuickBase came down smoothly, updated the files, and brought the new version up. This process took around 15 minutes.

After the servers were back up, a team of folks both in the office and at home logged in to do what is called ’smoke testing’, making sure all of the major functions in QB were working correctly. Smoke tests are simple tests that should take around 10 minutes. For example, my job was to test out all the different methods of ‘Create from Scratch’ to make sure that the base functionality was still working. Here’s Peter doing his smoke tests.

After we were satisfied that the main functionality was working, we removed the ‘updating’ page, and y’all were able to log back in.

We, of course, are being especially watchful for the next few days, to make sure we shake out any remaining issues that may crop up.