Item: Quickbase
Rating: 9
Author: Michael Buller

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization has a lot of uses for it; my department uses it for a variety of functions. The main areas are for tracking creative projects and web development projects, and managing content (assignment, approval, channel, etc.). We also use it to track budgets, ad performance, and contacts. We also have a separate app for tracking our student intern program.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It's immensely flexible and customizable, within each app and across different apps. The ways that you can use it are limited only by your ability to think about what you need. I haven't got much into script building, but have had some developers do that for us and that has extended its customization.
Reporting and notification. Again, customizable to the nth degree. If you can ask a question about the data in your app, you can build a report, notification, etc.
Reliability -- it's always working. Always up.

Cons

The email function. When you email reports and records to people, it bccs people so no one can see who else is getting it.
The search. It's almost too powerful and so when it returns records, it brings back so much that it's hard to go through. Granted, there's the advanced search, but it would be nice to have a down and dirty search that returns based on one or two main fields and returns results from newest to oldest. (We've built a report that does just that).

Alternatives Considered

Basecamp, DivvyHQ and Workfront

QB was more flexible and powerful. Basecamp had a nice GUI and DivvyHQ had some nice features, but they only picked off pieces of the total project management and content application. IN the end, the ability to build two apps (project tracker and content planner) and relate them with a couple of common tables made QB the easy winner.

Likelihood to Recommend

Quickbase is teriffic for any kind of tracking function - budgets, projects, content, contacts, you name it. It's also great if you have different levels of your organization that need to use the app differently. With roles and permissions, you can customize it so that it feels like that even with one app, you can have multiple uses. And, if you have the aptitude and need, it's pretty easy to build multiple apps that talk to each other.

Using Quick Base

Usability

It's easy to set up. Easy to create new apps. Easy to build forms and reports. You don't have to be a developer to understand it. ANd it's completely modular - so you can build something basic and then make it better. A lot of the higher level functionality needs to be done by developers but that's fine.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Search and Report Creation
Form Building

Difficult Tasks

Integrating fields across tables

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes - It's good but not all the functionality of the full web platform is there. Ideally, it should be a bit more robust, but for basic functions such as finding information in your app, reviewing reports, and adding new data, the mobile function works pretty well. As I'm often living in our various Quickbase apps though, I prefer the desktop version.

Comments

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