QuickBase November 2009 Release
We were planning on a second issue of QuickBase best practices, but that will have to wait - QuickBase surprised us with a November release so let’s all get up to date on the new features!
Overview
The main beneficiaries of this release are QuickBase customers with many users. Customers can now manage large numbers of users at once, and most importantly, there is now a “sandbox” for making changes to applications without affecting current operations. This feature, however, is only available to Enterprise users (around $1,500/month).
User Management
You can now import and provision any number of users by just importing from a comma delimited (csv) file. And once they are imported, you can search by name, type of user or other criteria, and then deactivate, deny use, or email all the users you have selected.
Reporting
These insert/delete icons appear when you float your mouse over filter lines during report setup.
In the past, if you had two or more filters for a report, you could only delete the bottom one. Now, using the red light/green light icons, you can add or delete filters at any point in the stack.
These insert/delete icons appear when you float your mouse over filter lines during report setup.
Sandbox
This one is important. It has always been difficult to make changes to QuickBase applications that are in production — there has always been the risk of accidentally breaking an important app during development.
Now, Enterprise users can create a “sandbox” — a development environment where they can make changes without affecting the active application. When development and testing are done, you press a button, and all your changes are applied to the active application.
This does not solve all the issues related to development. For example, you cannot make any destructive changes to the sandbox application. You can’t delete fields or tables, change data types, etc. So if your changes involve any deletions, the sandbox will not help you.
But still, for Enterprise customers at least, it is a big step forward!
Happy clicking –