Item: Quickbase
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Darrow

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We track products returned for failure analysis. Returned components are tracked from receipt to final reporting to the customer. Because many different support personnel are involved, our Quickbase application is important in making sure there is an orderly flow from start to finish and that nothing falls "between the cracks". All involved individuals have visibility to the progress of the component through the process and received automated email reminders when a specific action is required. Previously, this was "managed" in typical fashion with Excel spreadsheets and emails which, as we've seen time and again, is a recipe for failure.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easily accessible global visibility to support case records in the table. Visibility access can easily be controlled: for example privileges can be set up so that users in one location can only view records for their location while other users have visibility to records across the organization.
Very easy to customize to meet an organization's needs. Can be further customized so that different users in the same company see a GUI that is customized for their particular area.
Very powerful ability to send automated email notifications to users based on programmed rules (e.g. on record creation/change, based on a user's user group etc.)
Very easy to create customized reports. I've found this very useful to improve compliance; users that can quickly create visibility to exactly what they need to see quickly become avid users and are able to effectively leverage Quickbase for the workflows.

Cons

Tabular reporting has limited cosmetic formatting options. This is mostly due to the fact that Quickbase is designed to run on virtually any type of display screen.
Most graphical plots, while technically sufficient, lack the "pizzaz" required for a customer-ready presentation.
Quickbase would benefit from a more friendly form-rules manager. On forms for which I have ~30 rules, it can become laborious to review or debug the rules.

Alternatives Considered

Very limited experience here so can't say much.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for:

Global operations (effective communications and information sharing across time zones).
Auto-formatted reporting that takes information from Quickbase fields and loads it into a pre-formatted report template.
Tracking actions and owners, with automated email notifications and tabular reporting to spotlight stagnation in a workflow.
Letting users create reports that let them tightly focus on only the information that is relevant to their job.

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