by Kirk Trachy under Partner Corner

Explore innovative ways to extend QuickBase Exact Forms and Calendaring functionality with two components from Juiced Technologies.

Exact Forms Plus! and the Scheduler were developed by Juiced Technologies to create feature rich enhancements to QuickBase’s Exact Forms and calendar components. Exact Forms Plus! enables you to generate MS Word and/or PDF documents in QuickBase and Scheduler provides multiple daily/weekly/monthly calendar views along with drag and drop calendar editing.

Join us when we speak with Keith Jusas, founder of Juiced Technolgoies for a technology webinar on Thursday, November 19th at 2:00 PM Eastern time. Register here.

Keith Jusas is founder of Juiced Technologies a Certified QuickBase Solution Provider that provides integration and development services as well as technology tools for QuickBase. http://juicedtechnologies.com/

by Bill Lucchini under Industry Trends, Partner Corner

On June 11th Intuit is hosting a free conference to talk about what it’s like to start a software business in today’s technical, economic, and business environment.  See my post on TheAppGap for more info on this free event.  Should be a great gathering of industry thought leaders including venture capitalists, CEOs, and analysts.  If you’re in IT, software engineering, or some related field it might worth coming and engaging in the conversation.

by Bill Lucchini under Customer Stories, Industry Trends, Partner Corner, Uncategorized

Last night TechCrunch announced that Coghead, a startup that built an online database, is going out of business.  Personally, I’m sorry to hear about it.  I’ve met some of the Coghead team and they are a smart, entreprenuerial team.   This is an important class of applications and there is a lot of opportunity, but in this environment it’s very hard to be a startup dependent on outside funding.  Today, I definitely feel lucky to be a part of Intuit, to be profitable, and to be the #1 player in the online database world.  For QuickBase I certainly feel that everything is a little harder in this economic environment but this news certainly reminds us to be thankful about what is working.

Based on this news we thought about what Coghead users, partners, and employees will do.  Here’s what we can offer:

• For Customers: We recognize that you need to move fast to replace Coghead and if you’re anything like QuickBase users, your apps are critical to your business.  To help ease the transition we’re offering:
  • Six months of free service to get started.  We’d like you to be able to focus on getting your business transitioned and not covering a monthly subscription.
  • Two hours of free consulting with a member of our QuickBase Business Consultant Program who can help rebuild your application in QuickBase
  • Unlimited support
  • Lastly, we will be offering webinars specifically for Coghead customers where we talk about QuickBase and discuss transition issues.
  • You can visit our web page for the offer here.
• For Partners: For those of you who have built businesses around Coghead we’d like to offer participation in either our QuickBase Business Consultant Program or our Intuit Partner Platform. 
  • The QuickBase Consultant Program is perfect for Solution Providers who are good at working with customers to solve their unique problems with QuickBase.  For customers you bring with you we will honor our 20% revenue sharing and we are working to organize a special free QuickBase training class specifically for partners coming from Coghead.  As a QuickBase Business Consultant you’ll also be eligible to participate in our lead share program.  If you are interested in the QuickBase Business Consultant Program please either apply directly to the program, or email darren_levy at intuit.com. 
  • The Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is designed for Independent Software Vendors that want to build SaaS businesses targeting Intuit’s 4M small businesses.  Like Coghead, IPP uses Adobe Flex for the User Interface so you should find some familiar tools.   If you are interested in the Intuit Partner Platform, apply here, or contact alex_barnett at intuit.com.
• For Employees: Any Coghead employee who is interested can submit a resume to Intuit and we will do our best to get it in front of all the relevant hiring managers either inside or outside of the QuickBase team.  Please send your resumes to sally_russell at intuit.com.

I wish Paul and his team the best and I hope we can help.

by Mike Hansborough under Partner Corner, QuickBase Advice & Tips

One of the most important ways to leverage the power of QuickBase in streamlining organizational data management is to understand and utilize table relationships.  QuickBase use a very simple but powerful model for creating relationships that relies on the following key principles:

1.     All relationships are specified as one-to-many.  There are creative ways to create other variants of relationships (one-to-one and many-to-many) but QuickBase specifically structures all relationships as one-to-many.  For people new to relational data, this means that a parent record such as a project has many children (tasks) and, vice versa, a task has at most one parent (project) to which it belongs.

2.     The method of defining the relationship is to create a Reference Field in the child table  that matches the Key Field of the parent.  The Reference Field can be a pre-existing field or can be automatically generated by QuickBase when the relationship is formed.

3.     Relational data is passed throughout the application via Lookup fields associated with the Reference Field that forms the relationship.  In order for a child record to display data inherited from its parent a Lookup field  must be created in the child table that pulls in the information.

4.     Summary data can be generated in parent records based on numerical information in the child records.  Without special methods, parent records cannot inherit information from their child records but they can output quantitative information such as the number of children, the last date a child record was created, etc.

MAKING A CHILD A PARENT

In certain circumstances the application model may require that a parent record inherit information from its child records.  Some examples where this might happen are:

-        A company record needs to have a primary contact and that contact’s information needs to be displayed on the company record.

-        Certain information pulled from an external source is loaded into a child records as a result of the structure of the source data but is really data that needs to be displayed at a parent level.

-        Approvals for tasks or other processes need to be tracked and the final approver name displayed at the task level.

The method for achieving this application structure is achieved by setting up the following tables and relationships.

1.     Create the parent table.

2.     Add  the child table

3.     Create the parent child relationship and make sure that the key field is either the default (Record ID#) or is a numeric  field.

4.     Add a summary field to the parent record that summarizes the key field of the child table.  Selecting the right summary is very important and may require some additional criteria.  For example, in the event that you want to set up a primary contact for a company you will need a checkbox or other identifier on the contact field so that you will know which contact is the primary.  The Summary Field should then be set to the Maximum of the Key Field and filtered for only those contacts checked as primary.

5.     Set up a relationship from that initially designated parent to its initial child, but in this case set the child table as the parent.  Be sure to designate the Reference Field as the newly created Summary Field.  You can then pull through any Lookup Fields that you need.

This simple way to “trick” a QuickBase relationship is just one example of the many ways that creative application architecture can be used to leverage information throughout your applications.  One strong recommendation when designing any application is to think through the architecture carefully before beginning.  Tables that have non-numeric key fields can’t be used as child tables in this kind of special case so it’s best to know early if your design might need a child record to sometimes function as a parent to its parent.

I realize that this can be a bit of a mind twister, but trust me it works, and creates a very powerful way to add leverage to your existing data.