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29 Oct : PDX User Group!
Team, Hope all is well! Just thought I'd say hello (still a fairly recent join to the Quick Base family) - friendly reminder of next week's PDX User Group! Even in the time span that I've been a part of QB, it's quite apparent that our Portland Quick Base community is continuing to grow (and rapidly); always a great opportunity to network & collaborate on platform builds/developments! Hope to see you there! ------------------------------ Kory Hoppes ------------------------------16Views4likes0CommentsAvoid These 3 Common Mistakes When Setting Up Your Quickbase Realm
Setting up your Quickbase realm is the first step toward unlocking greater efficiency and eliminating gray work. But like any new endeavor, it comes with challenges. Taking the time to avoid a few common mistakes upfront can save you a lot of headaches down the road. Here are three pitfalls to watch out for—and some tips to sidestep them. Assigning Incorrect User Roles Quickbase is all about collaboration, and assigning user roles properly is critical to ensuring everyone can do their jobs without compromising sensitive data. However, it's easy to make mistakes when assigning roles—like giving too many people admin privileges or not granting users access to the tools they need to either work or develop apps. How to Avoid This Mistake: Understand Role Types: Before assigning roles, familiarize yourself with the options in Quickbase, from basic users to full administrators. Follow the Principle of Least Privilege: Only grant access to what a user truly needs. This reduces risk and keeps your realm secure. Think about segregating highly sensitive data in a peripheral app, to ensure it’s easy for all admins to see who might have inadvertent access. Use Role-Based Permissions: Tailor permissions based on team functions to avoid accidental data breaches or mismanagement. You can use User Groups as one way to manage these assignments. Skipping Governance Tools Quickbase provides governance tools to help you maintain control and accountability in your realm. Ignoring these tools can lead to disorganization, inefficient workflows, or even security risks. How to Avoid This Mistake: Install the Governance Core Apps: This suite simplifies managing users, apps, and permissions. It’s an easy way to set yourself up for success, ensure regulatory compliance, and set your IT team’s minds at ease. Regularly Audit Your Realm: Schedule time to review user activity and ensure everything is running as it should. Create Usage Policies: Establish clear organizational guidelines on how apps are designed, documented, built, shared, and maintained. Failing to Plan and Document App Structures Jumping straight into building apps without a plan can create messy, inefficient systems. Over time, this can lead to confusion and make it harder to scale your solutions. How to Avoid This Mistake: Start with a Map: Outline how your apps will connect and interact. Identify the data each app will handle and plan your relationships accordingly. Keep a record of app structures, workflows, and key decisions. This ensures continuity as your team grows or roles change. Tools like Lucidchart or Vimeo can help. Build Out, Not Up: Quickbase works best when smaller applications share information with each other, versus everything being stored in a single, monolithic app. Consider what information would be useful as ‘hub’ apps, like employee data or contact lists. Think Long-Term: Consider how your business might evolve and ensure your setup can adapt to those changes. This course from Quickbase University can help you get into the app planning mindset. Final Thoughts Setting up your Quickbase realm doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By avoiding these common mistakes—assigning incorrect user roles, skipping governance tools, and failing to plan your app structures—you can build a strong foundation for success. Take your time, use the resources available, and don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Remember: a little effort upfront can save you hours of work (and stress) later. Happy building! What challenges have you faced while setting up your Quickbase realm? Share your experiences and tips in the comments below!79Views3likes0CommentsWomen's Qrew meetup tomorrow!
Good morning folks! Writing to remind everyone of our second Women's Qrew meet up that is taking place tomorrow, 7/16, from 1-2PM EST! Based on last month's conversation, we heard a desire to learn more about how to leverage your QB building skills to grow your career. Joining us will be two guest speakers to help foster a conversation around this topic: Nichole Braswell, Quickbase Developer at Sympo & Sherri Kottmann, Chief People Officer at Quickbase We're looking forward to hosting these two amazing women, and hope to see you all there! If you don't have the calendar invite, please join us via Zoom . As always, please feel free to reach out to me directly (tluccio@quickbase.com) with any questions.79Views3likes1CommentWelcome to the Women's Qrew! Tell us about yourself.
We would love to learn more about our members! Tell us a little bit about you. What is your name? What company are you with? What is your role there? What brought you to the Qrew board, specifically the Women's Qrew? What is one thing you are most looking forward to this summer? Feel free to include any other fun facts about yourself :)320Views3likes13CommentsThanks for coming out! PDX User Group
Great discussion today everybody - thank you! As we talked about, it's often hard to know when to break an app into more than one or many apps. Harrison wrote a great post about this: https://community.quickbase.com/browse/blogs/blogviewer?BlogKey=4d3963dc-2d01-490a-b8b7-b94a4a2bb491&CommunityKey=d860b0f8-6a48-487b-b346-44c47a19a804&tab=blogviewer Thank you @Lee Gilmore for starting off this conversation and lending us your expertise! ------------------------------ Jacob MacIntyre Manager Quick Base Portland OR ------------------------------Monthly Meetup July 26th 3PM @HMC
We have a recurring Meetup planned for the last Wednesday monthly at 3-5PM (Pacific Time). Agenda: Say Hello Presentation(s) Q & A General Discussion and plans for next meeting The location is Harder Mechanical Contractors. There are several parking lots surrounding the building where you can park. Please RSVP so we know to let you in the building. See you all soon! Here is a Google Maps link. 2148 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97212 ------------------------------ Jim Harrison transparency = knowledge + understanding : The Scrum Dudes ------------------------------33Views3likes2CommentsMarch 2025 PDX Qrew Meetup Notes
We started the March meeting with sharing updates on development progress during the previous month. Jen went first by showing a report designed to track progress and work complete on Jobs. The use case is to provide an easily digestible view for anyone with access to the realm. The report looks really nice and provides a lot of information with links to details. The goal of the report is to replace the spreadsheets used in the past. Next Kennedy updated Notifications sent to customers around warranty information. Seeing how others use the features of Quickbase to perform work is interesting. Jim talked about a Pipeline using the Restful API to get a report from Quickbase and then again using the Restful API to UPSERT changes to the table. The Pipeline takes three steps and uses the batch method in place of loops. He also shared progress on using QuNect to UPSERT to a UNIQUE lookup on a child table. Progress came to a halt when it was discovered that QuNect doesn't allow writing to lookup fields. Prior to a recent change by Quickbase to allow mapping tables using a Unique lookup field, this would have been an error. QuNect correctly made certain the builder didn't attempt to write to a lookup field. Now that writing to a lookup is allowed, QuNect is working on a solution and should have an update next week. Elena shared her work with Fast Field forms. She is building a solution for a customer. One problem was found problem with inserting a string value to a field. There is an option on the Fast Field form builder to insert a string literal. The string isn't written to the cell correctly. The workaround is to add a hidden field to the Fast Field form to take the place of the literal and then upsert that to QB. As we discussed Fast Field we moved into a general discussion of sharing our experience with Fast Field. The general talk about Fast Field includes a brief overview of the upcoming OCR feature. We have some interesting use cases to test out and determine if the Fast Field feature is preferred to the other offerings available in the market. During the conversation, Kennedy asked about Fast Field in general as her company doesn't have access. We gave a brief overview of Fast Field and then went over the features and differences between Fast Field and Quickbase. It seems like Jen has the most production level Fast Field experience amongst the PDX Qrew. Her experience in general is the separation between the two platforms causes duplicate work during development. We all acknowledge that while this integration is only a couple years old, improvements are taking place on a regular basis. As the platforms come together we expect improvements in the integration. As the Fast Field conversation died down, we started talking about the benefits and experience of using AI. We talked about how we use AI to write some code. We also shared our requirements & best practices for using AI. The conversation then moved towards an interesting AI use case. Elena shared a code page for designing a gardening layout planner tool. The page uses the Open AI pipeline channel to fill out record data based upon how the garden is drawn by the User. The Code page is a draggable quadrant like a square celled excel spreadsheet. Users draw a garden plan into the quadrant. Then using a header with drop down lists to define plants, soil type, that are in the selected cells on the quadrant. Next the code page generates values to be inserted into a table in Quickbase. Some of the feature ideas were to include suggestions from AI about plant placement, watering, soil all based upon the plant type in the generated records. The User now has a document with facts about the components of the garden design. It's a neat idea! The problem appears when the amount of data becomes overwhelming to the AI. The code page is generating a json array to send to OpenAI and that is where it seems to not work. The problem with the example is the number of key value pairs became too large and the AI was unable to process the data easily and at a reasonable cost. Good feedback from Jacob is to use the image itself or convert the data values into a series of questions and send the questions to open AI to produce the results. The reasoning is that AI is build upon language and may be more effective/ efficient than sending chunks of data. We all were pretty excited by this observation. The meetup began to wind down and we were beginning to say goodbye when Tammie King appeared in the Teams call. Since Tammie snuck in late, she asked about the cool excel like code page. So we talked about it some more. Again, we all were pretty excited by the garden designer code page. Then we talked about hanging out at Empower and then we called the meeting to a close. Jacob recommended the Pocket Pub as he felt it was nice the last time. While at the Pocket Pub we were witness to a storm front rolling over our heads. The news forecast was for tornadoes, lightening. The weather event was windy for about ten minutes. Some of us got dust blown in our beer before we could cover them with our hands. Then it rained and we continued our conversations.65Views2likes0CommentsJan 21st Meetup
Hello Ladies and Happy New Year! We have a meetup scheduled for Jan 21st from 1-2pm ET. We have a couple of topics we thought we could discuss to kick off the new year: Empower 2025 is scheduled for March 31st and April 1st. Who's going? Who's gone in the past and can speak to their experiences? We can give some insights into what's being demoed as well. Goals and discussion topics for the Women's Qrew in 2025. Do we have any goals we want to accomplish as a Qrew group? What product areas do you want to learn more about? Are there other discussions you'd be interested in talking about? If you have any other thoughts for agenda items, post here or feel free to bring it up on the call when we meet. Look forward to seeing you all!45Views2likes2CommentsThe magic of Service Accounts
We’re so glad you’re here! Today, let’s learn about Service Accounts and how they can help teams with multiple Realm Administrators or Builders working on integrations. Service Accounts are special admin accounts that let apps connect to Quickbase and use its data without needing a specific person to log in. This is super helpful when multiple people on a team are working together on integrations because it makes it easier to see who’s doing what and simplifies collaboration. Here’s why Service Accounts are important for your team: Transparency: They give a clear view of how and when data moves in and out of your apps, so everyone knows what’s happening. Security: They help keep things secure by allowing automated tasks without sharing personal login details. Continuity: They ensure processes aren’t reliant on any one individual. This helps avoid disruption. Even if someone leaves the team, everything continues running smoothly. For step-by-step instructions on setting up Service Accounts, check out our help article: Setting up Service Accounts. Feel free to ask questions or share your experiences with Service Accounts below…and happy building!47Views2likes0CommentsFirst Virtual Meetup tomorrow (6/18)!
Hello everyone! I hope you all enjoyed your weekend. We're looking forward to our first virtual meetup tomorrow (6/18) from 1-2PM EST. If you have yet to register and are able to attend, please register here! Here is a light agenda for the conversation: - Introduction to Women's Qrew leaders - Purpose Statement - Hear from Heather Karas about her experience using Quickbase - Call for presenters - Set meeting cadence We're looking forward to hearing from YOU tomorrow, so come prepared for an interactive session :) If anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me at tluccio@quickbase.com.Solved104Views2likes3Comments