Archive for October, 2008
by jsullivan under QuickBase Advice & Tips
Leaders celebrate other people’s success and keep employee motivation high. Everyone likes to be recognized for their efforts and QuickBase can help.
As the calendar year is in its final quarter it is essential for all businesses to finish strong and start the New Year on a positive note.
Last week I spoke with a client who had some questions on best practices with QuickBase. He was a Director of Account Management and was using QuickBase to successfully track renewals and contracts. The renewals rate was strong and many accounts grew; the reports he created in QuickBase proved it.
The dilemma was that he wanted to share the good news with other groups but did not know how. After further discussing the issue we came up with a great solution. Since his company has an internal site that all employees read daily, we thought this would be a great place to post the reports that prove his employees are doing well.
The total time to get this up and running was about 15 minutes. The sales figures are now posted on the internal site for all to see and the data is dynamic. It will update as QuickBase updates, this is not a snapshot that needs to be uploaded periodically.
How did we do this?
- Share the application with “Everyone on Internet”
- Selected the report he wanted to share
- Sent an email to the Webmaster which included the URL for the report and the URL to the QuickBase Knowledge base article
- The Webmaster tweaked the page accordingly and uploaded the changes
Once the report was visible on the internal site, he received immediate feedback that was very positive and it boosted the morale of his group.
As a leader in his organization he is expected to be strategic and tactical and his responsibilities include clear communication and motivating employees. This simple change has helped our client accomplish his goals, but more importantly he sees the added value QuickBase can provide as he helps his organization plan for the future.
by Dave McCormick under Inside QuickBase, QuickBase Advice & Tips
What does it mean to be a committed user?
Commitment (Com·mit·ment |noun| [kuh-mit-muh nt]) The act of committing, pledging, or engaging oneself.
Commitment is a word that’s used daily here at QuickBase. Commitment to the success of our customers, to the quality of our product, to delivering value for Intuit shareholders, to continuous growth and improvement… the list goes on and on.
This post is about another dimension of commitment. “How committed are QuickBase customers?” is a question we ask ourselves every day.
Here at QuickBase, we can say with confidence that we are ‘committed’ QuickBase users. QuickBase applications perform (this is an educated guess) 90% or more of our Mission Critical Functions. We use it every day, on every team, for critical aspects of our business. We use it to manage sales, support, marketing, product development, engineering, human resources, and a thousand other things… even lunch runs, and who owes whom for said lunch runs. The point is: We don’t want another solution. We’re so engaged, so pledged, so committed to using our QuickBase applications that switching to another solution would be unthinkable and probably impossible.
We know that not all of our customers are in the same boat. There are countless differences between our business and your business. What we have in common, however, is that we all decided at one point that QuickBase could probably solve one or more of our business processes better than “the spreadsheet shuffle” or another system.
Once that decision was made, the real work began. The moment you decided to give QuickBase a try you took the first step of a journey. That journey probably had more than a few barriers and roadblocks to be overcome.
One of my top priorities this year is to gain a deep understanding of the barriers our customers face on their journey to commitment, and find ways to knock them down.
Why am I curious about your experience?
Why am I trying to learn more about the barriers our customers face on their journey to commitment? The simple truth is that I want our customers to succeed. I remember interviewing for the first Customer Advocate position here. I signed up for a trial account to research the product beforehand, and quickly realized that I didn’t know what to do with this thing. It took me about 6 months of heavy immersion in the product to get to a point where I could say that I understood how to build a decent application and actually solve some business problems with it… and that was only the beginning. I empathize with all of our new application creators and I remember what it felt like to try to learn this product while still having to do my “day job.”
Here on the Support team, we see many customers who struggle to learn the product and apply that knowledge to create and deploy great applications for their teams. We have some sense of the common barriers new customers face, but I don’t think we know enough to put together a strong plan to radically improve the experience. We need to know more, and that’s where you come in.
What are we trying to learn?
We’re trying to learn more about the potholes, roadblocks, gotchas, and other problems you encountered as a new QuickBase customer on your journey to commitment. Was thinking about your business problem in terms of the data that drives it a problem? Was it a lack of understanding around a feature or piece of functionality that stumped you? Was it the fact that building an application was more time consuming than you’d imagined, and if so what took the most time? Was it the fact that your users didn’t adopt your application or use it like you assumed they would? Did you have a plan for how you’d roll the application out to your audience? These are the kinds of things we suspect are tripping our new customers up, but we’d love to hear it straight from you.
What are we doing to learn more?
One thing my team is already doing to learn more is reaching out to customers who have signed up in the past six months and offering help. We’re proactively calling accounts that have little or no usage and trying to get a better understanding about what may be standing in their way. While we’re at it, we’d like to help you over those hurdles and get you that much closer to a successful application that’ll really make a difference for your business. And then we want to help you do it again, and again, until you find that QuickBase can make a world of difference in many of the processes that your business relies on.
Call to action
So, how can you help us help you? You can help by telling us your story. If you’re one of the customers that receive a call from us out of the blue, offering help, take us up on the offer! Spend some time venting, telling your story, sharing your frustrations, and I promise you we’ll find a way to help you. If you’re still reading this post, leave a comment and tell me about your journey to ‘commitment.’ Don’t be shy – let it all hang out – and tell me what the most difficult step along the way was. Leave us feedback on our website. Above all, know that we’re trying very hard to make improvements to the product and the way we help customers, because we want you to succeed.
Thanks for reading,
Dave McCormick | Group Manager, Customer Support
by achakmakjian under Inside QuickBase
A couple of weeks ago, New England Patriot Troy Brown retired from football after playing his whole career with the Patriots. For me it was a bittersweet announcement as I felt it was coming sooner or later, but I kept up hope that he’d get one more year. I think he was the greatest Patriot player ever, and one of the best team players in NFL history: Guys who play more than one position, who play wherever the team needs them at the time.
There have been other players who did this in their careers. In different decades, Deion Sanders, Jim Jensen, and the absolute legend in this category, George Blanda come to mind. Troy is our local hero. Troy was the Pats all time receiver in yards and receptions. He played defensive back during the 2004 season when the Patriots backfield was decimated by injuries and came in 2nd in the number of interception on the team that year. He was their 4th string quarterback. He was their all time leading punt returner.
People in San Diego still rue the moment where Tom Brady threw an interception late in the 4th Quarter of the playoff game and Troy Brown crossed the line of scrimmage on a cut-in, saw the interception and mentally switched to from receiver to defensive back and stripped the ball from San Diego’s defensive back thus saving the game for the Patriots. (And for my Intuit colleagues in San Diego, please bear with me, there’s a point to this beyond opening up a old sporting wound).
The reason I write all this is to call attention to a team within a team here at Intuit’s Platform-as-a-Service Group, our Quality Assurance team. In the lean (and growing) team environment they play at every position. They do release management tasks, they regression test our code, they take customer issues escalated from support, they write automated tests and, in a couple of cases, helped us write some code when we were short staffed.
The Platform-as-a-Service Group here is staffed with people who are always willing to do whatever needs to be done to get the job done. Now for full disclosure, up to about a month ago, I’ve actually been both the development and QA manager. Given the growth of both teams, we’re looking for that right person to lead the QA team to the next level (that’s a plug, we are recruiting). I just wanted to give a high-five to our QA engineers for the multitude of things they do to improve the quality of our products: QuickBase and the Intuit Partner Platform.
Finally I just want to say that Troy Brown has not endorsed QuickBase as a product, but I’m endorsing that our QA team does their job like Troy Brown did his.
by Dave McCormick under QuickBase Advice & Tips, QuickBase News
You asked and we listened. Intuit QuickBase has worked with Real World Training, an Intuit endorsed trainer since 1998, to create an online, one-day QuickBase training class that replaces the 2-day, hands-on classroom course previously offered. The class leverages interactive online technology to deliver a great learning experience. Students will interact with instructors and other students while experiencing live demonstrations of the critical skills you need to develop great applications. This is true synchronous online learning from a trusted Intuit training partner. Now you can get QuickBase training wherever you are — no travel required.
Registration is $399.95 per student and attendees receive a complimentary copy of the Mastering QuickBase Manual (in PDF format). Multiple attendee discounts are also available.
During this full day course you’ll learn how to:
- Design and create QuickBase applications from the ground
- Import data into QuickBase the right way
- Customize QuickBase applications so they work the way you do
- Make your applications easy to use and manage
- Deploy your applications to the people who need them most
- Secure the data in your applications by role or function
- Leverage workflow and communication tools that keep your team up to
- Get information out of QuickBase (reports, charts, and exporting)
- Work with documents, formulas and functions
- Manage applications, dashboards, roles and users
- Get started with the QuickBase SDK/API
And much, much more…
See a complete list of what you’ll learn during the Mastering QuickBase one-day course.
by Peter Fearey under Inside QuickBase
We’ve been getting questions about our next release. I can’t make any specific commitments to when our next release is scheduled or what will be in it because making announcements about future features/functionality can cause problems with how you recognize revenue. I can say that our product management and engineering teams are committed to delivering updates to QuickBase and, more specifically, to building features that are visible and helpful to you…our customers.
While we’re on the topic of our evolution, let me share some of the great changes we’ve made in recent months.
1. In the last year we have doubled our engineering team’s size and are continuing to hire incredible talent. These additional engineers are helping us make significant improvements in less visible areas of the system, including:
- Improving infrastructure and security to handle growth
- Integrating and adapting to innovations in hardware and software
- Creating development tools for software developers and more technical application creators
2. We’ve reorganized and reinvested in the sales and support sides of the business. Specific examples include:
- We’ve doubled the size of the support team to help ensure your support experience keeps up with the growth in our customer base, and
- We have re-engineered many of the tools we use to support our customers.
Both these items are focused on helping us drive a more delightful customer experience and it seems to be working as the results of the survey we do with each case continue to get better. In fact, lately we’ve been getting some responses like “Support was excellent” and “Speedy solution. Really appreciated it!” so we know we’re on the right track.
We are committed to evolving QuickBase and, as a 5 year veteran of the QuickBase team, I can tell you it’s a blast being on the QuickBase team these days because of the great team growth and big improvements we’re making.
by achakmakjian under QuickBase Advice & Tips
I’m Armen Chakmakjian and I’m a Manager of Product Development in the Platform as a Service Group (PaaSG) here at Intuit. For the last year I have managed development work for Intuit QuickBase and parts of the new Intuit Partner Platform (which is in beta…check it out it is really cool).
The thing I want to write about here seems kinda simple to some and probably will open new vistas of possibilities for others. Quickbase is such a cool tool to map a process to data as well as sharing information. And it is really flexible, which is how I got myself to the point of sharing my little widget with you.
What I’ve done here is create a quick and dirty dashboard using html iframes and tables and QuickBase reports. The reason I thought I’d share this is that it’s quite a simple feature and it allows me to create a live dashboard that I can share with others as they pass by my office.
In this particular case I’m sharing two charts with my colleagues. One chart shows the issues based on priority that are open or in progress now and the other the issues that have been checked in and are ready for quality assurance to test. The exciting part is that we can literally watch the columns go up and down as people are fixing things or finishing testing (and sometime finding new things).
Charts make a dramatic view, but you can use quickbase summary reports for the same effect. And though you can write some sophisticated front end GUI’s that talk to an app through QuickBase’s HTTP API, this is quick and dirty, pretty manageable by anyone who manages a QuickBase of their own or has privs to add pages to a QuickBase app.
Basically if you can see the customize link at the upper left when looking at your QuickBase app, click that and then click “application” then chose the “pages” tab. You’ll see a link to “create a new page”, click that and when it asks you what type, select “text page”. Then you see a list of pages and yours will be at the bottom. Click the edit link.
Now an editor appears. Now I’m going to show you the trick. In that box put the following code
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”30″>
<html>
<Body>
<font size=24> My Awesome Team’s Stats (updated every 30 second)</font>
<table border=”1″>
<table>
<tr>
<td> <iframe src= “https://www.quickbase.com/db/XXXXXXXX?a=q&qid=YYY” width = 800 height = 800> </iframe>
<td> <iframe src= “https://www.quickbase.com/db/XXXXXXXX?a=q&qid=ZZZ” width = 800 height = 800></iframe>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
In this example you need to replace the URL after each “src=” with the URL of each of your chart report. The cute thing here is that you can add rows and columns in html relatively quickly to this if you want to experiment. For example you can have smaller summary reports displayed in 200×200 boxes all side by side if you want more data and less charts. The meta line at the beginning is the key to the whole thing because this brings the dashboard to life. Every 30 seconds the screen gets refreshed, meaning the data is fetched and updated all the time.
Oh, yeah, the way to display it: Once you’re done editing, click “save and done”. You’ll be back at the list of pages. To the right of the one you just created, there is a “more” button. Hit that and select “preview”. Voi la! a window pops up with your chart refreshing every 30 seconds (you can save the url from this window and put it on your app dashboard or bookmark it in your browser). Now you can do like I did: I turn my second monitor around and share team stats with everyone walking by, while continuing to work on my primary monitor.
Like I said, simple, quick and useful. Anyway try it and if you have a more interesting way to display every refreshing charts and tables (using javascript maybe), I’d love to hear about it here. Good Luck
