Easier App Creation is Here!

Here at QuickBase, we’ve been doing a lot of thinking. We took a long, hard look in the mirror and acknowledged that QuickBase is powerful (and when placed in the right hands, downright magical) but some simple processes are overly complex. So, we’ve begun to identify the most common workflows and will be working to make them easier and more time efficient in upcoming releases.

Our most recent release on October 24th focused on simplifying the app creation experience. Since many of our customers use multiple QuickBase apps to run critical business processes, app creation is one of the most common workflows. If you’re an admin, a user with app creation rights, or have signed up for a free trial, you’ve probably created an application. (Pssst…If you’re a user without app creation rights but need a solution, just sign up for a free trial and we’ll help you build one!) In listening to customer feedback we saw that some people were frustrated with certain inefficiencies in the process.

Our goal with this release was to streamline app creation by addressing key workflow issues in the user interface. The new, tabbed view allows you to navigate to your method of choice for creating apps (i.e. templates, from scratch, or data import) and start building in just two clicks. Also, finding a template just got a lot easier. You can now search across all templates or browse by category to get a plug-and-play starting point to create an app that works for your business.

In the video below, one of our beloved information designers walks you through the new app creation process. For complete release notes visit the KnowledgeBase article here.

One final note. As you can see, user feedback is an important part of how we improve QuickBase. We want to know what you think about these changes! Use the comments below to start a discussion on these changes. Or if you have specific product feedback or enhancement requests for our product team feel free to enter an enhancement request

Alex Hastings

Alex manages social media for Intuit QuickBase. Her goal is to help users connect with the QuickBase community and build a constructive discussion around the product.

Datta

I hope that the next release incorporates, to begin with an actual change log of sorts, Quickbase is a powerful tool no doubt and scratching the surface has revealed just as much, but in any Project Management, the need for a customisable change log is crucial.

I’ve read through many articles about tracking changes, but none are really intuitive, a word that is often used to describe Quickbase. There might be workarounds, but they are smart not intuitive.

My project on Quickbase has more than 20-30 people using the application to log changes and true accountability and clarity can be had only if I have the ability to log each change in my database the way I want.

I wanted a feature wherein a table would be populated automatically based on certain triggers and a new entry created for each change as defined.
The append feature is ok, but clutters up the whole view on repeated change to a field. I don’t want to confuse my user with 2 fields “Status” and “Data Entry for Status” every time I want an append field. How about if the append field was in another table which captured what was happening in the “Status” field which was being used by my user? It would make the table much neater for the user, and I can take a dump of the other table to accurately track the progress of my project’s development.

Form Rules
Another point I wanted to know was why certain triggers work only in “Form” mode and not in either Grid Edit or other modes.
Eg: If a user changes a document status to “Done” I want him/her to attach that document or fill a field with the document name. Making this rule in the forms is absolutely of no use to me if the user can easily bypass this “rule” by using the application in Grid Edit, which is obviously much faster for large status change than the form mode.

Email-Notification
Can a CC feature be added to email notifications please?
Much like in normal circumstances, managers would like to be in copy of the changes being made by other team members.

Another feature which I thought would be basic to Quickbase is the ability to send notifications to concerned parties in a very intuitive way.
Say I have 500 records and 25 groups, each group has the responsibility of updating x records each, with common users in these groups too. They may only view/modify specific records. Also I mention groups because those records do/may not have 1 user as owner or as person of responsibility, but the group as a whole is.
So now I’ll have to set up 25 unique notifications for each group, so the wrong group is not notified on the change of other records.

I think this can be solved if along with “All users access to this table” there was option which went like “All users having “view” access to these records” “All users having “modify” access to these records”. In this case I need to just set up 1 notification and not 5. This can be further customised with an exception list.
As an admin I might have all access to these records, but I don’t want to be bombarded with updates regarding 500 records having various status. My ISP would think I’m running a honeypot!

Hoping to see these features soon so that I really take my QB application to the next level.

[Reply]
Alexandra_Hastings Reply:
October 27th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Thanks for taking the time to write such detailed feedback! This is really good stuff. Our dev team will love this.

As I said in the post, specific enhancement requests are best entered in Product Central at https://www.quickbase.com/db/bcygqv9yy — Product Central allows us to better connect your feedback with the dev team. Let me know if you have questions about submitting a request!

In the mean time — do you have any feedback about the October 24th release?

[Reply]
Datta Reply:
October 28th, 2010 at 5:23 am
I’m speechless about it, hence didn’t include that.
But thanks for pointing me in the right direction regarding the other enhancements I’d like to see.

[Reply]
jayenh

I love that you can start an App by importing a CSV file. Why cant the same be done for an individual table? The auto-detection of columns/fields and field types would make creating tables much quicker in many instances.

[Reply]