by Philip Gross under Inside QuickBase

We are working to bring an enhanced community site to our customers, partners, and prospects. As such I thought I would ask the community (that’s you!) what sorts of things would be interesting to you, and what he would be looking for in an online community about all things QuickBase.

Our existing community forum is primarily being used by the technical developers to deliver tips on how to build applications. While that’s great, and we certainly want to encourage more of that over time, we also want to start engaging the less technical users and creating connections between our customers. What do you think you might have in common with other QuickBase customers?

For example, how about a community of people who are managing projects? Would you be interested in discussing project management tips and tricks with other QuickBase users? What about pointers on getting started with QuickBase, or how to roll out QuickBase to your business team? Would you be interested in reading about this? Would you contribute your knowledge to other QuickBase users?

What about helping maintain and comment on our help and knowledge base articles? Would that be useful to you?

Do you have examples of other websites that do this well? Other companies we should be emulating?

If you have any feedback, please comment below. Additionally if you would like to have a longer conversation, please drop me a line at phil_gross (at) intuit.com

Thanks for your input.

by Ellie Ellerman under Uncategorized

On December 6th we released an update to the QuickBase product. One of the most visible changes was the “Reports” tab on your My QuickBase page that lets you add a number of reports from any of your applications for easy viewing. The intent was to make the My QuickBase page a much more valuable piece of real estate for our users. This is a beta feature and we tried to make it easy for users to give us  feedback. 

Well, we received a lot of really great feedback from you and Monday night we released another update to the page. 

Key things to look for:

• We updated the layout of the MyQuickBase page to give more room to both the Applications and the Reports tabs.
• You can now configure how many records to display per report.
• If you want to see just the summary table for a report, now you can.
• We fixed various formatting issues you may or may not have run into.
• You can now see the Reports tab in Safari and Chrome browsers.

We continue to work on this feature so please keep sending us feedback through the in-product Beta Feedback link or here on the blog.  It is very, very helpful for focusing our efforts.

Thank you all for your great ideas about this product and for your passionate support.

Ellie Ellerman, Senior Product Manager, on behalf of everyone who worked on these features.

by Bill Lucchini under Customer Stories

As I’m approaching my second year running the QuickBase business, and my 15th year at Intuit, the thing that has always kept me motivated is the prospect of doing something that makes a real, meaninful difference for customers.  What’s really interesting about the QuickBase business is that our customers do much cooler things than we do.  We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can make the product and service better, but then, when it gets out in the wild, customers make it dance.  Some of my favorite stories are below:

• Dan Pries at ProPoint Graphics tells us that his  company hasn’t missed a deadline since implementing QuickBase.
• CIO’s like Vivek Kundra of Washington, D.C. are using QuickBase to replace some expensive enterprise applications.  (Best of luck, Vivek!  You have the QuickBase team’s vote!)
• PC Magazine uses QuickBase to track reviews and features.  Also, we just won the Editor’s Choice award.  Thanks!
• A major hospital runs its emergency room via QuickBase on a massive touch panel screen in their command center.
• Google saves $100k to $200k per year and 1,500 to 2,000 man-hours on Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance by using QuickBase.

2008 has been a big year for us.  The general acceptance of online products (SaaS) grew rapidly this past year and, as the leader in the online database space, that energy led to a lot of new customers.  Thank you to all of our users (over 350k) and I hope all of you come to work with the same energy and passion that I have to make a difference.

Lastly, I’m hungry for more.  With so many new customers I’d love to hear about the cool things you’ve been able to do with QuickBase.  Tell us your story!  I invite you to comment on the blog and tell us the following information:

• The name of the organization where you use QuickBase
• Your title
• What you use QuickBase for including the type of application, how it relates to your business, and…
• How QuickBase has made a difference in your business.  Has it helped you save money?  Make money?  Make better decisions?

Add your story (complete with the info above) and we’ll send you a QuickBase care package that includes a QuickBase polo shirt, “QuickBase The Missing Manual” by O’Reilly, and a $10 iTunes gift card.  Oh yeah, please include your shirt size.  :)

Deadline: As of Friday, 1/23/09 I’m going to draw the line on submissions and send out the care packages so make sure you post your story before then!

Thanks, and best wishes for a wonderful 2009!