by Kirk Trachy under QuickBase News

Tune in Thursday 9/24 at 2pm Eastern time for a webinar entitled: “ How to add Microsoft Outlook to QuickBase”. This open webinar showcases “SendToQuickBase” and “SendToOutlook” an Outlook integration product from SoftTech, Inc. “SendToQuickBase” bridges and extends QuickBase so users have full Outlook Integration for email, meetings, appointments, tasks and contact updates.

Anything that is in Outlook is sent to QuickBase and anything in QuickBase can be sent to Outlook.

Joe Acunzo, President of SoftTech, Inc. will be on hand to show how to set up and use “SendToQuickBase” and “SendToOutlook”. If time permits we will dive in to how this product is used for routing inbound emails directly into QuickBase (i.e., email requests) and how companies use this for logging QuickBase events.

The webinar is entitled, “ How to add Microsoft Outlook to QuickBase” and you can register at http://quickbase.intuit.com/webinars/.

This is one of 10 live and interactive webinars we hold each week. All are welcome.

by Kirk Trachy under QuickBase Advice & Tips

You can add buttons to your QuickBase forms that launch activities with other web services. Buttons for Google, Yahoo, Linked In, Twitter, etc.

To add these buttons:

1. Right click over the name of a field that is close to where you want the button to be and scroll down to add a new field.
2. Name it what you like and select a “Formula URL” field type and save. The text will show up on your form but we haven’t told the button what we want it to do so it is blank.
3. Right click on the name of your button and select “Edit the field properties for this field…”. If you like you can cut and paste the example code into the FORMULA area. See the example code below.

Copy and paste the following example code. Use your own field names in place of the ones below. NOTE: Sometimes when you cut and paste the quotation marks pickup unwanted formatting. Especially the quotation marks. Make sure when you paste that they are the straight up and down quotation marks and not the angled ones. (Thanks Jared)

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Google Information
“http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=”&URLEncode([Company]&”+”&[Address]&”+”&[City]&”+”&[State]&”+”&[Zip])

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Google Finance
“http://finance.google.com/finance?q=” & URLEncode([Ticker])

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LinkedIn
“http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sik=1178917462007&keywords=”&URLEncode([Name]&”+”&[Company])

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Twitter
“http://twitter.com/search/users?q=”&URLEncode([Name])&”&category=people&source=find_on_twitter”

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Virtually every web service has some widget that you might want to launch from QuickBase. Using Formula URLs can help integrate them with your QuickBase.

You are welcome to attend any of our 10 weekly webinars. Many of the webinars discuss online database items just like this.

by Kirk Trachy under QuickBase Advice & Tips

I got an email from Ryan who wants to create a unique identifier for each of his sales opportunities.

QuickBase already creates unique identifiers. Sometimes they are called Record IDs and in the case of his application (Sales Force Automation), the counter is a key field named [OpportunityID]. Whichever field name it is, it is counting every time a new opportunity is created. You can use this field or add to it by adding a number to make it larger say… a four digit number or you can add text to it by concatenating the text from some other text field to make this separate new formula text field.

If your want the result to be a number then use a formula numeric field and enter something like “[OpportunityID]+1000″.

If you want your result to be mixture of numbers and text like the company name then use a formula text field and add something like this: “ToText([OpportunityID]&”"&[Account - Company Name])”.

In other words, if the [OpportunityID] is “57″ and the [Account - Company Name] field is the company who’s name is “5M” the formula text field puts them together so they look something like: “575M”.

Here is an brief overview video:

We do things like this in our webinars every day. You are welcome to pop in and we can do it live.

http://quickbase.intuit.com/webinars/

by Kirk Trachy under QuickBase Advice & Tips

You can enhance your QuickBase Lead Tracking, Sales and CRM applications by adding a LinkedIn button that does intelligent lookups into LinkedIn. Frequently we call people and companies and we wished we knew more about who we are calling. Try adding a simple button to your application QuickBase. QuickBase will pass the company and contact’s name to LinkedIn for a quick lookup.

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All you need to do is add the following to a new Formula URL field:

“http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sik=1178917462007&keywords=”&URLEncode([Name]&”+”&[Company])

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If you only have “First Name” and “Last Name”, modify the link so it reflects your usage. Like this:

“http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sik=1178917462007&keywords=”&URLEncode([First Name]&”+”&[Last Name]&”+”&[Company])

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Check out this How-To Video.

We talk about things like this in many of our 10 weekly live webinars. All are welcome whether you want to ask questions or just watch.
http://quickbase.intuit.com/webinars/

Have a blast with your QuickBase.

Kirk Trachy
Intuit QuickBase | 781-370-4438 | kirk_trachy@intuit.com

by Bill Lucchini under Customer Stories, Industry Trends

Back about a year ago I posted about customization and SaaS.  Some people have said that one of the primary inhibitors to adoption of Online Applications (SaaS) was that there is no ability to customize them.  Well, as all of you know as users of QuickBase, that doesn’t have to be true.  Just recently I did a post asking to hear stories about how people were using QuickBase.  The results were awesome and one reaction I had was that reading the comments was enough to prove the point that customization and online can go together.  Here are a couple of examples:

• Scott Skibell at National Seminars Group uses QuickBase to organize over 700 training videos.  In his words:
  “ I created a content management system in QuickBase that points to our different servers…  …Marketing and web designers can search the database and click a preview button to watch the different videos. They can then copy the file’s URL and use it in their code for web pages or downloads. This saves me countless hours each day and streamlines our workflow. Without it, we’d probably have to hire someone just to track everything. QuickBase is a godsend.”
• Tamara Littleton is CEO of eModeration Limited and has a global challenge.  She has offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles, as well as 65 staff members working in locations such as Belgium, Germany, Australia, etc.  They use QuickBase to track time cards, manage their clients and new leads, track projects, bring new employees on board, and track staff experience, knowledge and preferences to match them to projects.  You can see more in her excellent comment to my post.  This one company demonstrates the flexibility of QuickBase all on their own.
• Patti Dornacker uses QuickBase to track expense reports for employees.  Employees complete an online form and reimbursement rates are calculated automatically.  They’ve been able to please employees by reducing turnaround time and managers get easy access to reports that give them the info to stay within budget.

As you can see from these examples, because QuickBase is an online database it can serve a broad variety of needs.  People in today’s world have begun to expect things to be exactly how they want them.  Today we have 190k different ways to have our lattes at Starbucks, we can get custom printed M&M’s, or the awesome Flip Mino video camera that you can order with a picture of your choosing on the body (my wife’s has a grasshopper).  It’s time software started working for us and working the way we want it to.  No more “one size fits all” software that solves everything everyone asked for and in the end is such a clutter that it makes no one happy.

by CustomerSupport: ChongLim Kim under Industry Trends

It’s Friday January 30, 9:25 A.M. as I start this blog.  Ever wondered what a roomful of 150 database uber aficionados get excited about? I’m about to find out while waiting for the delayed start of the 2nd New England Database Day at MIT’s Stata Center. Why am I even here? I had thought QuickBase might be too well kept a secret among database professionals, and had proposed to present a poster session on QuickBase architecture and customer use examples for this event. After encouragement and support from various QuickBase managers, I was further gratified to get personal interest to help from Jim Salem, QuickBase Architect, and Liz McCann, QuickBase Senior Marketing Manager; both provided the content for the poster.

I’ll do a separate blog on our poster; here, I thought I’d touch on some of the database research topics from the day’s speakers that might be of interest to the business technical users of QuickBase. The following are not meant to be summaries, but are just notes I took during the speakers’ presentations.

Prof. Mike Franklin, UC Berkeley and Truviso, Inc. “Continuous Analytics: Supercharging Query Performance with Stream Processing.” Not real-time query processing; stream processing. The research vision: classical “store-first” database is not ideal for business analytics of net-centric data. Want lower latency; but driver today is data volume growth. This is one of the two key-note topics for the conference and seems interesting to me in light of current interest in web user behaviorial analytics.

“Deep Web Search with Morpheus.” Example use case: How much is house at 44 Xxxxx Road, Manchester, NH, worth? Can use willow.com website; fill in form for site to generate information. Another example: I need a 3* hotel for less than $150 in Cambridge, MA. Can use hotels.com, and again ask question through form on web site. But data behind web forms is not visible to search engine. Morpheus — wrapper of user defined functions (that replicate a user filling in the web forms). The next web search frontier…?

Asst. Prof. Daniel Abadi, Yale University. “Data Management in the Cloud: Limitations and Opportunities.” (As an aside, Dan’s talk included an entertaining discourse on a post from The Database Column, a multi-author blog on database technology and innovation: ‘MapReduce – A major step backwards’ by Prof. David DeWitt and Prof. Michael Stonebraker.) If want milk, one can buy a cow, or buy bottled milk. Buying computer to host a database app is like buying a cow. Cloud Computing is like buying bottled milk. Data analysis applications more suited for cloud computing than transaction oriented applications. Food for thought…

David Karger, MIT CSAIL. “Baseless! Why the Best Database is No Database.” Proposal: Low performance database; object relational model; weak/no type checking; semi-structured data; simple queries only; direct manipulation; do not disclose existence of database; learn from user, not make user learn databases. “Exhibit“, a tool built at CSAIL for Database “Backed” Web Sites. Any topic on making databases easy to use naturally would grab my attention…

Alon Halevy, Google. “Structured data on the Web: where we are and where we can go.” Hypothesis: there are new opportunities for data management on the web if we focus on collaboration and lightweight tools. Topic: Deep-Web Crawl… three flavors. 1. Vertical search: a single domain; data integration techniques (e.g. Transformic, Morpheus); goal: close a transaction, or show related items, reviews, etc. 2. Search for anything; goal: drive traffic to relevant sites. 3. Product search; in-between above two. Topic: WebTables — a web-scale collection of tables; data is interesting, but there is much more in the structure itself: attribute correlation; synonym discovery. Topic: Organizing Query Results by Aspects: e.g. Kosmix; using dimensions to organize search results. This is the other key-note talk for the conference; always good to keep up with what Google is up to…

by Kirk Trachy under QuickBase News

We launched a new version of QuickBase over the weekend (6am EST on Saturday to be exact.) The release delivers a range of new features that even Santa would be proud of. Included is QuickBase access for the iPhone and a cross-application reports tab on your My QuickBase page.

And there’s more… you will find new tools for improving control, manageability and security in your applications.

iPhone Access	Improve productivity with anytime, anywhere iPhone QuickBase access View critical reports, manage tasks, find contacts and more
Cross Application Reporting	Increase visibility across your QuickBase applications with the new Reports tab on the My QuickBase page Create your own “favorite reports” page to easily access the most common reports you use across all your QuickBase applications
Security	Add an optional layer of security to protect your application. With new Application Tokens, an unauthorized person cannot create API calls to your application Don’t want everyone in your company to see your applications? Hide your applications from the searches fellow employees conduct from the My QuickBase page
Manageability	More easily perform data backup or application testing by optionally not copying file attachments when cloning applications Improve data accuracy and reduce user errors by limiting the number of characters end users can store in a text field New API calls will be available to help manage users and roles
Other	See What’s New for more information. Release Notes with help topics will be available in the QuickBase KnowledgeBase with the upgrade