by Kirk Trachy under Inside QuickBase, QuickBase Advice & Tips, QuickBase News

If you thought QuickBase was a powerful database before you are really going to be impressed with the addition of formulas, summary and lookup fields to our forms.

This isn’t just hiding or showing fields or sections on a form. This is controlling your form with formulas, changes to lookup, summary and reference fields.

This opens up many new possibilities for forms:

Say you have projects and you have a field called [Project Type]. You use that to describe whether it is a Marketing, Sales or Support type of project. Every time you add a task you need a different set of fields to show based on the project type. Before you would have to create a long task form with all the unneeded fields showing. With form rules now sensitive to lookup fields your project type can now control what your task form looks like. It’s fast, easy and simple.

How about a better way to keep on top of your project’s issues? Say you want to see your issues when they are open but want them to go away when closed. Using a Summary field you can now have them pop up when opened and disappear when closed.

Here’s another one, let’s say we are working on a task and it is overdue. How about using form rules to pops up an alert screen, switches the priority to high and require a note be entered? You can do that too.

We also enhanced our QuickBase alert functionality. You will notice them in applications and on your My QuickBase page.

“I cannot express how excited we are for the dynamic form rules. First conditional drop downs and now this! Christmas was early this year! Thanks QB Team!”
-Melissa

“This is incredible!!! I am so happy to be able to have more power over my form rules! This will save all those creative workarounds I was used to dreaming up! …Conditional Drop Downs & Form Rules!!!! Thank you QuickBase!!!”
-Hunter

“Thanks for listening and making it happen. Keep the enhancements coming!!”
-D.J.

Check out the video to see how you can use this new feature and review the release notes http://quickbase.intuit.com/resources/node/2004 for a complete item listing.

If you have any questions be sure to let us know or pop into any of our 10 free weekly webinars at http://quickbase.intuit.com/webinars/.

Have a blast!

by Philip Gross under Inside QuickBase

Jim Salem, our chief architect, will be presenting the QuickBase architecture to the IASA New England chapter on April 23d. If you are in the area, and are interested in the nuts and bolts of how QuickBase is built, come on by! You can register at: http://bit.ly/odJjm

Details are below:

————–

Inside SaaS: Deep Dive into the Intuit QuickBase Architecture

Examine a rich software-as-a-service platform in detail. Used by over half of the Fortune 100, Intuit QuickBase solves critical business problems via its easy-to-use and easy-to-customize applications.

Jim Salem, QuickBase’s architect and co-founder will present its unique, highly scalable application engine which seamlessly integrates multiple web services including database, email, workflow, and reporting.  We’ll discuss its patented active-active load balancing technology that has made it one of the most reliable, fast and proven SaaS technologies today.

Its Windows-based hosting technology has  been extended as the basis for the Intuit Partner Platform, a service for RIA developers to deliver QuickBooks-integrated applications to small businesses. We’ll cover key design choices in data flow, network, and container design that have made QuickBase especially suited to hosting diverse applications for thousands of businesses.

Jim Salem
For the past 25 years, Jim Salem has been a pioneer in distributed computing and in the software/platform as a service space. He has extensive experience in all aspects of internet service delivery including scalable hosting infrastructure design, automated application provisioning, efficient resource management, and 24×7 operations.
In 1999, Salem co-founded Intuit’s QuickBase, where he has been responsible for architecting and delivering fast, reliable PaaS and SaaS services to hundreds of thousands of users. While at Intuit, he has held senior management positions in engineering and operations. Salem is currently the Platform-as-a-Service Group Architect.
Prior to Intuit, Salem served as Director of Web Hosting Engineering at GTE Internetworking (BBN Planet) where he supported thousands of servers in ten data centers. Earlier, he was a senior engineering manager at Thinking Machines, which developed a 65,536 processor parallel computing platform. Salem earned a B.S.E.E. degree from M.I.T. in 1984.

Date: April 23rd, 5pm-8pm
Location: Intuit Offices
100 5th Ave
7th Floor
Waltham, MA 02451
Agenda:
05:00pm-06:00pm Networking
06:00pm-06:15pm Chapter Announcements
06:15pm-07:30pm Inside SaaS: Deep Dive into the Intuit QuickBase Architecture

Register at: http://bit.ly/odJjm

by Kirk Trachy under Inside QuickBase, QuickBase News

Whilst most of us were still in bed sleeping this Saturday, our QuickBase engineering team was up early readying for a new QuickBase feature release. This release sports three main features, numerous improvements and many enhancements.

If you have ever filled out a form and selected a make and model of a car you will get an idea of what one of these features is. We call them “Conditional or Cascading” drop down boxes. Whatever you select first effects and determines your second choice. It has many applications and is one feature that has been a top request of users and developers.

Also released is a new “Home” tab that is replacing the “Reports” tab on your “My QuickBase” page. We’ve changed it to reflect greater functionality. In short we have increased the number of function panels, enabled a versitile text/html editior for video, scripts and whatever other html gadget you can think up.

One more thing. If you’re an Account Administrator, you will be pleased to know you can now delete unverified users within your domain.

Give it a go, kick the tires and let us know what you think.

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 Philip Gross under Inside QuickBase

Whenever we do a new release, we do a lot of testing in preparation, to make sure that the release goes smoothly.

Many folks were up late testing, and in by 5:00 for the release on Saturday at 6:00. In the last few minutes before we deployed the latest version of QuickBase, I brought around my camera and had folks describe their role during our ’smoke tests’, that small window where we performed critical tests while QuickBase was unavailable for customers.

by achakmakjian under Inside QuickBase

Several weeks ago, in a pinch, I was making our (in)famous Waltham tuna casserole for lunch.  Phil Gross noticed that I had made a variation of the normal casserole by adding Salt and Vinegar chips on the lower layer.  He thought that this would make a good topic for the “Inside QuickBase” kind of features we want to do for our blog.  So here it is:

Waltham Tuna Casserole

Anyway, I’m posting this just subsequent to meal time on Thanksgiving on the east coast here in the U.S. as a little entertainment for you over the weekend.  We really do eat this once in a while, if there was any question.   It was good fun pulling the video together.  Happy Thanksgiving!

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