Today, we announced a strategic initiative that focuses on large companies, and the launch of the Enterprise Edition of QuickBase. We’re all very excited here as we’ve been having quite a bit of success with large enterprises and we believe that this new initiative will accelerate that growth.

QuickBase has always been about enabling teams to work together better, and that has not changed (and will not change). However, the needs of large business are different, and the Enterprise Edition is meant to meet those needs.

Although we have in the past been somewhat coy about this, QuickBase is really a platform for business users to develop web applications for their team. Yes, we’ve been successful in Project Management, CRM, Training, and other areas, but at the heart is the QuickBase platform, which is great for enterprises, as you can have one platform to host dozens of applications all for one low price per user (now how much would you pay?).

In a large organization, IT has a clear need to centralize technologies to ease management and maintain security and minimize risk. However, too much power is not always a good thing, and if IT takes the centralized control too far, it makes it very hard for teams to get tools to help do their work.

The whole goal of the QuickBase Enterprise edition is to recognize that dynamic tension, and give IT the control they need, but still put the business users in the driver’s seat. I’ll give examples of this in later posts, so stay tuned.

Go ahead and check out our press release on the Enterprise initiative, and the new Enterprise tab.

Oh, and another thing – Check out our top bar. You may notice a link to this blog. Bill did say we were reinvigorating the blog, and here’s one way we’re doing that. Smile, y’all.

We often get requests from people wanting to backup all the file attachments that are associated with their applications.  A quick way to do that is to use QuickBase Desktop.  QuickBase Desktop is a Microsoft Access database that synchronizes data between QuickBase and a local computer. When you do the synchronization, QuickBase desktop creates a folder in the same directory as the Access file for all the related documents and pulls all file attachments down to that folder.  If you’re interested in doing this, checkout the following Knowledgebase article.  It has the Access file attached and it talks about how to automate the download. 

I hope this helps!

Listen up IT folks! We recently released a new application for IT project portfolio management. After some in-depth market research and observing what has made one of our largest customers successful with their IT Project Portfolio Management application, we took our learnings and then applied them to our QuickBase app called Project Portfolio Manager. 

So you may be asking, what makes QuickBase such a good fit for IT project portfolio management? Go see for yourself. Take the application for a test drive. If you are an existing customer, you can access it through the QuickBase Application Library. If not yet a customer, get some more info here and sign up for a trial.

-Liz

This was a great conference attended by about 300 people many of whom were senior industry leaders.  This makes for very interesting conversations that really expand how we’re thinking about what we can do for customers… which brings me to the topic of this post.  Customers.

There was a customer panel at the conference that I attended and it was very interesting.  Phil Wainewright did a great job as moderating and has an interesting blog on ZDNet here.  There were four people on the panel and they all had some sort of hosted solution running in their business.  The funny thing was that three out of four made it clear that they desperately need QuickBase and they don’t know it.  I bet if I talked to the fourth one a bit more I’d find evidence that she needs QuickBase as well.  Here are the examples:

Ian Burkheimer is a Program Manager for Tourism in the Pacific Northwest Economic Region.  The best quote from him was that his boss thinks "Excel is a database".  We all know that emailing spreadsheets around is the number one sign of a business in dire need of QuickBase.  Excel is not a collaboration tool.

Jim Thompson is Director for Internet Technology and Marketing for the CRC Health Group.  CRC manages a large chain of substance abuse recovery centers.  They have trouble managing the "census" which is the report that says who is in what program in what center at any given time.  QuickBase would make short work of this.

Gary Cunningham is Director of Human Resources and Employment Service for Olenick and Associates.  He asserted that one of the key things you have to give up in the SaaS (hosted) model is customization.  For QuickBase, our ability to customize to any situation is one of our key strengths.

This panel really reminded me that everyone needs QuickBase and our mission is to find a way to let them know that there is a better way than what they are doing today.  Do you have ideas on how we get the word out?

-Bill

As a Customer Advocate here at QuickBase I talk to new users
every day who all share a common goal: Make QuickBase right for me! Teaching new users how to build and customize applications can be challenging because every user and business process is different. Here are a few tips that I would give to anyone looking to
get started with QuickBase:

• Learn how to manage
  your QuickBase account. Now that you’ve signed up for QuickBase you need to
  have an understanding of how to manage the account and keep track of users, space,
  and billing information.

• Familiarize yourself with the online resources.
  We invest heavily in developing documentation, tutorials, webinars, and other
  resources to help you learn QuickBase. Check out the community forum and ask other
  experienced users for their advice or learn by watching with video tutorials.

• Contact
  support.  Don’t be afraid to submit a support case. There are actually
  real live people here at QuickBase assigned to help you.

• Learn
  by example. We have a wide range of applications that are ready to go right
  out of the box. If you’re not sure how to get started take a look at these
  applications. There’s no harm in making a copy for yourself and customizing it.
  This is a great way to learn…and if you mess up, no biggie just create a new
  one!

• Contact a Solution provider. If you
  need QuickBase to sync up with other systems, have an extremely complex
  process, or just don’t have time to build a QuickBase application, consider
  working with one of our certified solution providers. This is a network of  professional developers who can provide you
  with that one- on-one support that you need to ramp up quickly or even build
  the application for you if that’s what you’d prefer.

So now it’s your turn to share your tips with us. For those
of you who would consider your application a success, what helped you get
started? What challenges did you face? How did you learn? What else do you think
the QuickBase team could do to make the “getting started” experience easier?

Bill Ives, contributor for FastFoward made reference to this stat in the second to last paragraph in a recent and very thorough blog he posted on the current state of QuickBase. Based on a conversation he had had with Bill Lucchini and Peter Fearey just the other day, Bill eloquently depicts the very essence of QuickBase. Emphasizing our long-standing status in the market as a reliable and proven application provider, while bringing to light how QuickBase is fitting in perfectly with the current Web 2.0 movement.

Now with the increasing acceptance of Web 2.0 – We are continuing to see tremendous momentum on all fronts with our prospects and existing customers – not only from the business perspective but with IT as well. Business users are finding more and more innovative ways to put QuickBase to use and IT is gladly welcoming the fact that their business users are more empowered to create their own solutions, while becoming far less dependent on IT for application changes.

Share your story with us. How did QuickBase come to be in your organization? Was it through your business group or IT? And what are some of the innovative ways you are putting QuickBase to use today?

Check out Bill’s blog here: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2007/10/29/quickbase-enterprise-20-application-builder-for-business-users/#respond

-Liz

Intuit has a ton of different ways of slicing and dicing customers into “target segments”, but the one I’ve been spending a lot of time with recently is a very basic “Customer type” model.  This model breaks customers into three basic segments based on their purchasing mindset.  The segments are: Do it Yourself, Do it with Assistance, and Do it For Me. 

QuickBase has been a fantastic solution for the “Do it Yourself” segment.  The ability for any business user  to fully customize business applications for their team is incredibly powerful.  But of course, not everyone has the Home Depot mindset when it comes to their solutions.  We’re finding more and more customers coming to us in the Do it with Assistance and Do it For Me segments.  For these folks, we’ve seen them have great success by tapping into our extended community of QuickBase “experts.” Through a network of passionate customers and professional Solution Providers, there should be resource available regardless of your appetite for app creation.

-Alex