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Quickbase Case: ProPoint Graphics
Filed under: Intuit, Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase, QuickBooks, SaaS
Profile
ProPoint Graphics specializes exclusively in PowerPoint and Flash presentation production on a project and ongoing basis. ProPoint Graphics has completed thousands of presentations for over a thousand clients of all sizes across most industries throughout the United States. The company meets the needs of its client base by delivering high-quality, professional presentations quickly and cost-effectively. ProPoint Graphics is a privately owned company and has successfully leveraged the right technology to maximize productivity among its employees, which include full-time, part-time and contract workers.
Challenges
SendToQuickBase for QuickBase – Product Demo
The gap between Outlook and QuickBase has been bridged for the first time with a single click of the mouse using SendToQuickBase. This new product from SoftTech allows Outlook email messages, contacts, calendar entries, tasks and notes to be easily saved into QuickBase. Upon saving, the information is automatically related to any existing QuickBase record such as a customer, sales lead, or project record.
Advantage Connectivity Links now include eResults
Advantage Connectivity Links now include eResults
Advantage eResultsTM works with any application running on the Intuit QuickBase Platform and connects into the VerticalResponse Platform for professional quality mass emailing. It enables immediate benefits which include:
- Reduction in days for new orders
- Lower cost of customer acquisition
- Improved customer retention
- More informed employees, partners, and suppliers
eResults enables professional quality Newsletters, Surveys, and Marketing Emails Integrated with Sales Pipeline. It works on any PC that has internet access. It requires no new hardware, software, or IT support. Read more
Shareable Databases: Intuit QuickBase Bringing Desktop Database Users into Enterprise 2.0
Shareable Databases: Intuit QuickBase Bringing Desktop Database Users into Enterprise 2.0
by Bill Ives 
February 17, 2009 at 11:37 am · Filed under Communities, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps
This post is the first in a series we’ll be running over the coming weeks on “shareable databases.”
I have written about QuickBase on this blog before (most recently see – QuickBase’s New Developer Program: Going the Next Step to Support Its Developers and Their Mutual Clients) and as you know they are the sponsor of The AppGap. QuickBase is an Enterprise 2.0 shareable database that lets you select ready-made online workgroup applications or templates designed to solve common business problems, customize them to suit individual processes, and share within a team or an enterprise. I recently had a chance to talk with Peter Fearey and Liz McCann, who wanted to update me on QuickBase since we last spoke, about some of their latest initiatives, as well as their progress over 2008. Peter began with some of Intuit’s moves across the product line.
Brad Smith CEO at Intuit, has set a focus on “connected services.” There is both an increase in cloud offerings to enhance connectivity and an increased connectivity between desktop applications and web services. In addition, Intuit is promoting ways for customers to be connected with each other as well as the many experts within the broader Intuit community. This provides greater access to professional services for Intuit users by Intuit users.
Within QuickBase they are building on this broader theme by reaching out to users of siloed desktop databases and spreadsheets to bring them into the increased connectivity that the QuickBase SaaS platform provides. Last year they did a user survey that indicated their happiest and most supportive users were ones who migrated from desktop databases and spreadsheets to QuickBase. Liz mentioned one non-profit that kept track of their events on a desktop database hosted on a single laptop. This laptop was hand carried to events. When there were two or more events on the same night the extra sessions were covered through pen and paper. Then the notes were added to the laptop later. The multi-channel access that a hosted solution, such as QuickBase, offers eliminated this bottleneck.
Here is a more extensive example reported earlier on this blog, Out of this Galaxy – Delivering Premium Customer Service Has Never Been So Easy. For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information. It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all. Since January 2008 they have been using QuickBase for their customer service management needs – tracking customer status, their inventory status and location, what product they carry, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. They also have a solution that can scale to their rapid growth projections.
Encouraged by the survey results, QuickBase has gone after more desktop database users to bring them into Enterprise 2.0. They focused their product to meet both the needs of individual users, project teams, IT, and senior management. Most enterprises have thousands of critical databases siloed on individual computers, out of sight from IT and senior management, and difficult for team members to share efficiently. With QuickBase now everyone who needs to have access can see what is happening in thousands of operations critical to the business. With this enterprise strategy, QuickBase has seen significant growth both in the number and size of accounts. Like Galaxy Granola, and the famous potato chip commercial, once you try it, you cannot resist more. One client has 50,000 users. Here is a view of a workgroup administration screen. You can see that multiple databases can be managed through one interface.
You can also easily manage users as shown below.
…and manage groups through a consistent interface.
The press has been receptive. PC Magazine named them as an Editors’ Choice. The review said that “QuickBase puts your company’s database applications online, so that anyone in your organization can get customized, secure Web access to anything from inventory to contact lists to product management.” This choice selection was literally the case as the editor says that the PC Magazine editors use QuickBase to keep track of previews, reviews, and other features.
I think QuickBase is an excellent example of how Enterprise 2.0 can open up the organization. The market has looked favorably on this group of applications. Like many others in this niche I have interviewed for AppGap, QuickBase has seen significant growth despite a down market. Companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity.
As we have discussed, SaaS is an important component of this move to Enterprise 2.0 and IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets. With experiences like those reported by QuickBase, I can see why this is happening.
The QuickBase Team Collaboration Blog is carrying more of these stories, as well as ways to get increased productivity from the application.
QuickBase – PCMag Editors’ Choice
QuickBase – PCMag Editors’ Choice
REVIEW DATE:01.12.09 – by Edward Mendelson - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338773,00.asp
Ratings - Very Good
Bottom Line – Ultra-customizable, fast, and easy, Intuit’s QuickBase is the only business-class online database to come from a long-established vendor that a cautious company can trust.
Pros – Powerful, fast, reliable online database, extremely easy to use, but with elaborate options for user permissions, document storage, automated e-mail notifications, multiple tables, customized reports, and charting. Rich selection of prebuilt applications.
Cons – Attached document files can be exported only one by one. Charting can’t handle some complex data.
QuickBase puts your company’s database applications online, so that anyone in your organization can get customized, secure Web access to anything from inventory to contact lists to product management. You probably won’t want to use it as an enterprise-scaled database, but for almost anything else, it’s an impressive Web-based substitute for a server in your office. Unlike many current cloud-computing services offered by no-name vendors, QuickBase is a product of the long-established financial-software giant Intuit. It gets our Editors’ Choice rating partly because it’s actually what our editors chose: PCMag.com uses it to keep track of previews, reviews, and other features.
You can try QuickBase free for 30 days; after that, you have to spring for a subscription. Pricing starts at $250 per month and scales upward from there. That’s not cheap, but those businesses that can meet the price can have access to a surprisingly simple and elegant application. This simplicity becomes manifest within your first few minutes of using the online app. The straightforward, no-clutter Web-based interface has helpful prompts and explanations everywhere. I found it easy to get started either by using one of more than 300 prebuilt database templates-many contributed by real-world users-or by building a simple database from scratch. From there I found it simple to perform all the sorts of tasks the average user will desire from an online database, including adding multiple tables, setting up tabular and graphic reports, and fine-tuning access permissions for users.
What I like most about QuickBase is its clear interface, obviously the result of years of experience with consumer-level products like Intuit’s QuickBooks. When I first logged in, I clicked on the “Create a new application” icon and was taken to a screen that listed prebuilt applications in a dozen different categories. The Legal category, for example, offered applications for time and billing, multi-party litigation, contract management, and a document library. The document library app is impressive, thanks to a built-in revision-tracking feature that can store multiple versions of the same document. I especially liked the option to lock the document so that other people can’t upload new versions while I had the document open. All these prebuilt applications come with sample data, but it was easy enough to clear this out by clicking on a “Delete Sample Data Now” link at the top of any view that included such boilerplate.
You’re certainly not obligated to stick to templates, however. The “Create a New Application” screen lets you create an app from scratch or by uploading data. It took me about 5 minutes to create a database of my recent and pending assignments from PCMag, complete with an option to display overdue items with special color-coding. I also tried creating a database by exporting data from an Excel worksheet. The time-honored method for importing data into a database app is to export data from a worksheet into a comma-separated values (CSV) file and then import that file into the database. That method worked just fine with QuickBase-the app let me select the CSV file on my disk and imported it instantly-but I preferred an alternate method that spared me the trouble of creating a CSV file.
From the Editor: Consumer Software Driving the Best New Enterprise Features
From the Editor: Consumer Software Driving the Best New Enterprise Features
What features will be included in future enterprise software products? The answer lies in today’s consumer software. by James E. Powell
12/16/2008
In the last six months, in dozens of meetings, vendors and IT professionals have told me how the user base for enterprise software is rapidly changing. That shift will have ripple effects in the software they use, and two consumer products I’ve seen lately are leading the way.
Users have never been happy with IT’s project backlog. When working as a developer, I hated to tell my business users that the list of projects was still too long to complete within a year — or two. We could prioritize projects all day long, but my staff could only make a dent in the dynamic list of projects. There were few user tools to cut through the backlog — a report-writing tool for a mainframe payroll system used six-digit field codes users had to enter on 80-column coding sheets (then send to the data entry department to have them created on punch cards). Yes, it was the stone age of computing, when drag and drop hadn’t yet surfaced.
Since then, as vendors and IT managers will attest, tools have radically improved, in part as a response to the new (and younger) crop of employees who are no longer afraid to take an application by its horns to get the job done. Driven by experience with everything from complex search commands to using mash-ups on personal Web pages, users are no longer shy about digging in and getting what they want.
Where do enterprise application developers get their ideas for features? Lately, many of the best ideas I’ve seen are introduced in consumer software. From the first time I saw a demonstration of “drill down” in Intuit’s Quicken, I was hooked. Who knew you could get to exactly the information you needed so quickly? In a later version, Quicken (and Microsoft Money) introduced a single screen filled with key information (bank balances, invoices due, past-due receipts) long before enterprise vendors were touting “dashboards” and scorecards.
As we look ahead to the application trends for 2009, three features I’ve seen recently in consumer and SMB software products stand out as showing the way to more useful software.
Putting Tools in Users’ Hands
Last year I experimented with Intuit’s QuickBase (see my review at http://esj.com/News/article.aspx?editorialsId=2119), and since that time I’ve been using it just about every day to track editorial content and deadlines. I love it. Earlier this year I was introduced to TrackVia (http://www.trackvia.com), a competing do-it-yourself online database and reporting tool. The interest in and sales of TrackVia and QuickBase are a clear sign that both companies have a good thing going — easy software as a service that any end-user will appreciate.
TrackVia puts considerable database power in a remarkably streamlined interface. You can build a database simply by importing an Excel spreadsheet (the program figures out the right file types by examining each column’s data and format). From there, it’s easy to create data entry forms, build reports, and build logic into fields to simplify data entry (and reduce errors). Like QuickBase, TrackVia’s performance is nimble over a simple broadband connection using a cable modem, and pricing is attractive. Best of all, because it’s a SaaS application, data backup is not your job.
TrackVia also has features any IT department would love, including the ability to create a Web form, host it on your own site, and have the built-in logic automatically add records to your TrackVia database.
Putting tools like TrackVia into the hands of users risks the age-old problem of developing data silos — isolated, out-of-sync collections of data that can be difficult to control. The trade off: with a bit of control, you can give users the ability to get their work done without draining IT resources with tweaks to reports or requests to build reports “just like the last one but with this minor tweak” — requests that end up in a long queue and frustrate users and IT alike.
Helping Yourself
I’ve never seen a help desk that was adequately staffed. On the other hand, I’ve never known a help desk staff that always had all the answers once you reached them. In fact, I’ve often found that calling out over my cubicle wall about a problem often brought an answer faster than being put on hold or adding a request to the help desk’s queue.
That’s part of what impressed me with Intuit’s latest QuickBooks Accounting Premier 2009, an accounting package for the SMB market. Having a problem? Context sensitive help has long been a feature of most software applications, of course. QuickBooks now incorporates its context-sensitive Live Community right in the product, which shows answers to commonly-asked questions on its online forum — on the theory (to which I subscribe) that other users are often the best source of correct answers to your questions. (See illustration at right.) I hope we’ll see more public forums linked to application screens. If you don’t find an answer, you can leave a question and the interface will note when an answer is posted.
Instant Messages to Co-Workers
IT has long fought to control instant messaging programs, fearing (rightly so) that the information users can transmit via IM — not to mention the security holes they open up in an enterprise — isn’t worth the convenience offered.
QuickBooks 2009′s other new feature that caught my eye is its ability to send an instant message about a particular accounting item (company information, invoice, etc.) to another QuickBooks user in your company and begin a text-based chat. OK, it’s not rocket science, but it’s the first time I’ve seen the feature built-in to a small-business product in this way. The QuickBooks administrator defines the user base, so it’s only this set of users who can communicate with each other, eliminating the worry that confidential information can easily be sent outside the organization. The messaging client is built-in, so there’s no worry about violating firewalls, either.
The Shifting User Base
There’s no doubt that consumer software and online sites are leading the way in innovating features. Enterprises must come to grips with the fact that consumer products are driving their business users’ feature demands, be they application support for portable devices (such as Blackberrys) or support for combining data from multiple applications (à la mash-ups).
From what I’ve seen recently, developers of consumer software are ahead of the curve. Let’s hope enterprise developers can catch up.
http://www.esj.com/enterprise/print.aspx?editorialsId=3446
QuickBase launches new features
QuickBase launches new features just in time for Christmas
Posted by ktrachy @ 9:03 pm on December 8, 2008
Tags: Add new tag, Collaboration, Database, PaaS, QuickBase, SaaS, Web Database
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.
