Archive for September, 2008
by Philip Gross under QuickBase News
It was great talking to folks at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. I had some very interesting conversations with many people.
The theme of the booth this time was around Intuit’s ‘connected services’ strategy and direction. More than 4 million small businesses currently use Intuit’s small business products and services, By connecting these people to Intuit services and to each other, the we create positive experiences with easy-to-use offerings. We had four examples of connected services at the booth; Intuit Payroll, Intuit Partner Platform, Intuit QuickBooks Live Community, and of course Intuit QuickBase:
Connecting services to software: Intuit Payroll is a great example where we connect an online service (Payroll), to desktop software (QuickBooks), enhancing the value of both the software and the service. The Intuit Partner Platform (also known as the QuickBase Development Platform) is another great example, where we empower third-party developers to create innovative rich Internet applications that integrate with QuickBooks to solve unmet business needs on the web.
Connecting People to People: Intuit QuickBooks Live Community is a way for our users to ‘tap into over 4 million business brains’, as the sign said. It’s a great example of the value of connecting users, allowing them to share information and solve important problems together.
Connecting customers to Online Services: QuickBase is, of course, a great example of Intuit’s commitment to Software as a Service, for customers that want to work anytime, anywhere.
We were also excited to have four of our partners from the Intuit Partner Platform at the ‘long tail pavilion’ of the show: Advantage Integrated Solutions, Box.net, Count Me In llc., and DreamFactory. All four companies were showing their solutions for the Intuit Partner Platform.
Here are some photos I took at the show, to give you a taste of what it was like…:
by Joshua McGinnis under Uncategorized
- we’re at web 2.0 nyc and having fun! come on by our booth if you’re here. #
- http://twitpic.com/by8q – Having fun at Web 2.0! #
- Check out this demo of QuickBase being used to power an RFID Point-of-Sale solution:
by Joshua McGinnis under Uncategorized
- It’s official! The Intuit Partner Platform is open to the developers. Read more: http://ping.fm/zgSwP #
by Joshua McGinnis under Uncategorized
- Check out Dreamfactory (http://ping.fm/T2EML). Looks like they’re really starting to promote their new Collaboration Suite that runs on … #
by Joshua McGinnis under Uncategorized
by CustomerSupport: ChongLim Kim under QuickBase Advice & Tips
A few weeks ago, I was asked the following question, edited here for clarity:
“I have a master table called Contacts. It’s related to a details table called Addresses. The Addresses table has a column called ‘current’. Only one address per contact should be marked current. There’s a third table – Donations. Contacts is a master table for Donations as well.
What we’d like is a report of all donations, listing contact name, city and state. I’m wondering if I should create a relationship between Donations and Addresses…that does not seem right.”
So, graphically, what we have are the relationships
Contacts ∈ Addresses
Contacts ∈ Donations
You probably know we need to create a report in the Donations table; but how to access the address information in another (sort of related) details table?
Ultimately, in a Step 2, we need to have the one current address record’s information (from out of all the related records in the Addresses details table) to be represented in the Contacts master record. That will then enable us to create Lookup fields in the Donations details table, and hence to create the report in the Donations table.
Step 1. The way to represent text data in the Contacts table from the Addresses table is to create a new relationship in the ‘opposite direction’, in which the Addresses table is a master table to the Contacts table, which then acts as a details table. But, how would the contact record find the one correct address record to become its master?
1.1 From the original
Contacts (master) ∈ Addresses (details)
relationship, create a Summary field in the Contacts master table. Select, say, the “Maximum” summary function (in this particular example, other summary functions such as “Total” or “Minimum” would work as well) for the [Record ID#] field in the Addresses table, but only for address records whose [current] field is checked. Do this by setting that condition as the “Matching Criteria” for the Summary field.
1.2 Create a new relationship in which
Addresses (master) ∈ Contacts (details)
For this relationship, make the above Summary field in the Contacts table the Reference field to the Addresses table’s [Record ID#] key field.
1.3 Finally, in the new relationship of step 1.2, create Lookup fields in the Contacts table for data in the Addresses table that you’d like to be represented in the Contacts table.
Now we can proceed with Step 2.
by Bill Lucchini under Industry Trends, Inside QuickBase, QuickBase Advice & Tips
Last night I installed Google’s new Chrome browser. Now, there are a lot of interesting opinions ranging from “who needs another browser” to real excitement. You can try for yourself here. Personally, I don’t need another browser. The QuickBase team certainly doesn’t need another thing to test. What I do need (and I think we all benefit from) is competition. Microsoft had stopped doing any significant development on Internet Explorer after Netscape became irrelevant but has jumped back in now that FireFox has gained share and made IE a lot better. Competition works. Just one day after Chrome was released FireFox is getting defensive. TechCrunch just posted this article: Mozilla Fights Back With New Firefox Benchmarks where they claim that the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1 will be much faster than Google’s Chrome. Apparently nobody believes Internet Explorer is in the game at this point although version 8 is on the horizon.
So, back to specifics. When I run QuickBase with Chrome it is amazingly fast and at least for now, it will be my browser of choice – we’ll see what problems I run into. So, have you tried Chrome? What browser do you use and why? What’s the fastest?
