Qrew December 2024 Meeting Notes
We started the meeting giving our general status on what accomplishments we made this month. I would say the overall theme this month was everyone was busy. Due to being busy, not a lot of Quickbase work was done. We started off giving general updates with Dorian. Dorian spent some time this last month learning more about Quickbase. He is taking online QB Training and setting up a builder account. It will be exciting to watch Dorian progress through the learning process. Next we heard from Kennedy. Kennedy has been showing the Quickbase feature set off to other Big Sky stakeholders. One of the best ways to build interest in what Quickbase can do is showing it to others. When showing it to others, they start asking if it can do this or that and that builds on the development process. These simple questions may seem daunting but write them down anyways. Our brains process information at different rates. Sometimes it takes a while to think of a solution. Next thing you know, you're building and supporting an entire infrastructure the business relies upon to get work done. Next Diego talked about his experiences this month and had some really interesting questions for the group. Diego is getting comfortable conceiving and building structured systems. He shared observations on Users asking for changes and having to re-design a structure that is already in place. Another observation is finding what is already built and hasn't been used. Finally there is what needs to be added and how to do it in a way that gets used and still performs. Jen talked about building out some Apps for the service department and some UI improvements. She did a lot of building this month. She also has been working on integrations with Power Automate and HTTP connectors in Pipelines. Lee Gilmore made some comments regarding New forms versus Old forms. Learning what works for the old form versus the new form UI/UX and becoming familiar with the changes. We all agreed there is no reason to move to new style forms until Quickbase provides the same feature set as the old style forms. This feature set includes mobile functionality and form edit mode grid edit with sub-form rules. Sadly this leaves User experience in this strange state of unfinished partial solutions. Quickbase no doubt wants to proclaim new forms done and deprecate the old style, but doesn't seem interested in pushing New Style forms over the done line. Hopefully next year we will see some improvements to user experience. Elena spent time last month learning about Marketo. Also her team is working towards building a common data model for the Construction Apps in the Exchange. She shared her experiences learning about the complexity of designing the distributed data model with scalability in mind. The development of the Apps in the Exchange is complicated by answering questions like "how complex do you built it" and still have it be flexible enough to meet general requirements. At this point in the meeting, Diego asked Elena a question regarding overall decision making for product development. The question triggered an interesting conversation where nearly everyone had something to say. The question he asked; Who are you talking with to determine what solution to build and how deep you need to go? Diego then asked about how to communicate with stakeholders who aren't really interested or don't give feedback . Lee said treat the communication or lack thereof like an intake form. As builders we want to help and provide a solution. The problem happens when we get lost in the solution and are unable to provide what they are asking. It is important, and challenging, to listen to others commenting on our work and focus on their words, not a solution. Sometimes people are asking or saying things because it is how they process whatever it is we are showing them we built. There doesn't always have to be a solution. After that we went on to talk about other experiences we have working with others. Meeting with people and listening to their ideas. One interesting observation is people don't have a full sense of control over data in Quickbase. Having confidence in the data is important to getting and keeping User interest. It is easy to identify the lack of confidence when Users want to download the data and process it themselves in Excel. The challenge as a builder is to design User confidence in the data. We continued talking about how to structure data. Planning and best practices. Next Jim talked about progress on building a new Subcontractor form and process named Subcontractor Prequalification. The idea allows a User to formally request a Subcontractor is added to our Work Order system. The process replaces the current system, which is based around email, Teams and phone calls. The goal with the Subcontractor Prequalification process is to locate the information in a single database with progress alerts. Users can choose to receive Notifications on status changes, ask for status updates, stop getting notifications or learn when the Subcontractor is or isn't added to the system and why not. A benefit to this process is we now have a datastore of previous requests anyone can review before putting in a duplicate request. There were no collaboration questions this month for Quickbase development but it felt like we came together discussing Users and right sizing app building in general. Overall it was an interesting conversation, covering a problem that is complex and challenging. Any professional builder has had to deal with questions that have nothing to do with building the software part of applications. How much satisfaction does the builder provide the User versus calling it done? Afterwards we went to Broadway Grill & Brewery and continued the conversation eventually leading in to tales of upcoming and past travel. We decided then the PDX Qrew meetup next month will also be a week early and then fall back to the fourth Wednesday in February.January 15th PDX Qrew Meetup
Portland Qrew is meeting a week early again for the dark months. The plan is to talk about current projects, new changes and challenges. Sometimes we show off our work and cheer each other on to higher heights. We ask attendees to bring problems to solve and then work together to provide a solution. Anyone willing to share is welcome to have a problem solved by a team of very nice people who all love helping. Afterwards I suspect we will go out somewhere and welcome recommendations. If you would like to join remotely email jharrison@harder.com directly and he will send you a Teams invitation. We do not record or AI these meetings.November 2024 PDX Qrew Notes
Attendees: Dorian Gibson GSM - Jen Clark GSM - Lee Gilmore QB - Jonathan Miller QB - Elena Larabee QB - Nico Cantillo QB - exec cust success Esther LaVielle QB - QB Kennedy Maxey Big Sky Montana, joined last year, subs, project management Tammie King - work tracking apps, client transfers Pierce Wagner HMC - Jim Harrison HMC - Diego Alvarez HMC - Big Qrew this month! Many attendees from Quickbase came to the event to see Johnathan Miller. Unfortunately Jonathan was held back by the storms of fall in the PNW. To give some scale to the events, there were hurrican force winds at the coast and we made the news-drama! Better luck next time Johnathan. Luckily we have Teams and got to see Jonathan safe at home. We started the meetup with introductions and an opportunity to talk about ourselves, where we work and what we do. After introductions we asked if there were any collaborative or problem solving questions from the Qrew. Tammie K said she had some questions about time, as in what is Quickbase time and how to handle it in Notifications expected to send during local time programmatically. Good Question Tammi! The time problem is in the Photo Shoot Scoop App. The App is a scheduling tool with reminder Notifications. The App uses EOTI for Customer access and an Internal App for photoshoot process management or scheduling. One feature sends a reminder email to the photographer the night before the photo shoot. The uncertainty appears when asking how to calculate the correct time to send the email in Pipelines. The uncertainty continues on what happens to the email time when daylight savings time changes. These are very good questions Quickbase could spend a help page explaining expected behavior of time and how to manage the problem globally and locally. The current solution is to press the button a day before the shoot at the right time. Lee Gilmore had and idea and some information at the ready. Lee said time setup is available in the new custom email feature allowing specifying a send time. The details to the time setting is it is in UTC. We were not certain how to handle time zones and changes due to Standard or Daylight savings. Also several attendees mentioned that Pipelines time is UTC and Builders really want to use a formula to determine local time. I would love to see an article in the QB Help that investigates the detailed scenarios for this time problem. Time is not easy to solve, it is generally easier to use UTC globally and then make corrections at the local instance. Next we had a new Qrew join the event from Montana. Kennedy M says they are rolling out a database. The database is designed to handle warranty tracking for real estate properties, job locations and current or upcoming projects. The system uses EOTI for customer login. We are looking forward to hearing more from Kennedy in the coming months. Another new PDX Qrew name, Dorian G also attended remotely. This month the introduction and update is they are maintaining current processes and getting comfortable with QB. It takes about a year to get comfortable with Quickbase and we look forward to being a part of the experience. This month Jen C is working on variances in inventory, how to manage inventory, working with a Customer (co-worker). Service App on FF. Diego A is currently working on Pipelines and running into an error. The Pipeline step to search a table is confusing in that the next step pretty much requires a loop through the results. Since Pipelines allows Builders to Search Quickbase and not add a loop it is easy to get into a state where the process fails. I suspect it is part of learning how to low-code ones way into a solution. Learning Pipelines is next level in Quickbase and takes time. It's good that Elena was able to provide an answer and Diego is back on the way to completing the Pipeline. Pierce W says this past month has mostly been working in Workato. Jim H gave an update on a SQL process. We have a Training Library and genreate Training records for Quickbase Users based upon their Job description, it's complex and was written using variables and a WHILE loop. The old method was very slow and limited in scale. The new method takes advantge of Uniqueification and UPSERT methods recently released by Quickbase and it is awesome! In other processes that once took thousands of Integration Reads and minutes to complete, we can UPSERT an entire dataset and instantly update or add records all based upon the unique field and not the record id. Next Elena mentioned the kanban overlay is working. We got a demo and the page is looking very professional. Code pages are really an end game for the low-code builder, releasing them from constraints built into the Quickbase UI. In Elena's example a dashboard with an iframe loads a code page designed as a Kanban report replacement. The features setting the Code page apart from native Quickbase Kanban are impressive and really should be how Quickbase offers these solutions. The nice thing is Quickbase offers a solution for the Builder to make it all work all based upon gumption. Another attendee Jonathan M gave an update on the roof and an introduction. Jonathan is now the PNW Quickbase rep, congratulations! This month was spent planning for this new position, Qrew meetups and learning about tire chains. We are happy to hear the roof is good. Nico C just came back from a Customer Qrew Okto engagement. The event focused on using Document Creation & Secure Links to provide a solution for a Contract life cycle form. Nico was really excited about the solution and wanted to give a presentation. The soultion uses Secure Links to EOTI in this case a Vendor. The Vendor opens a form, fills out the form and submits it back to the Owner. The Owner receives the form, does some work and then sends a printed document to the Vendor. The solution also allows for setting end dates to expire the link, meaning if EOTI gets a hold of the link it may not work. Esther L gave an update on scheduling all the Qrew meetups for December. Next goal is getting more presenters at the events. Lee G gave an update on the Thanksgiving planning app. Everyone agreed Marshmallows do not belong in Macaroni & Cheese. Last thing I recall discussing is the announcement of Empower 2025. Empower is taking place in New Orleans. Event dates are March 31 & April 1st. Some mention was made that Ben Simon is planning something with Beignets, we look forward to enjoying some Beignets with Ben. We went to the Pocket Pub, Lee likes it and the Jalapeno Poppers are very nice.December 18th PDX Qrew Meetup
Portland Qrew is meeting a week early again for the dark months. The plan is to talk about current projects, new changes and challenges. Sometimes we show off our work and cheer each other on to higher heights. We ask attendees to bring problems to solve and then work together to provide a solution. Anyone willing to share is welcome to have a problem solved by a team of very nice people who all love helping. Afterwards I suspect we will go out somewhere. I am thinking Eem but welcome other recommendations. If you would like to join remotely email jharrison@harder.com directly and he will send you a Teams invitation. We do not record or AI these meetings.November 20th Portland Qrew Meetup
The Portland Qrew Meetup is scheduled for tomorrow, yes I forgot, at 3PM. We have another special guest as Johnathan Miller of Quickbase is visiting Portland and will be in attendance. The plan is to talk about current projects, new changes and challenges. We will finish up the meeting by asking for any collaborative problems to solve and then work together to provide a solution. Anyone will to share is welcome to have a problem solved by a team of very nice people who all love helping. Afterwards I suspect we will go out somewhere. If you would like to join remotely email jharrison@harder.com directly and he will send you a Teams invitation. We do not record or AI these meetings.October 2024 Qrew Meetup Notes
Qrew meeting attendees: Elena, Diego, Jim, Lee, Nico, Jen, Pierce Nico Cantillo a Customer Success Manager from Quickbase joined the PDX Qrew this month. It's an observation that all the Quickbase representatives I have met in the past few months are curious and interested. I find they are asking questions about our experience and looking for feedback. Some questions came up around our opinion of Empower Pro, what did we like/dislike and of course to Give Feedback. Quickbase'interest and engagement does not go unnoticed. We started out the meeting with Introductions all round. After introductions we each shared our progress or improvements in the previous month. Diego began with updates he is making to Dashboards. Recent Quickbase updates to Dashboards, we have been adjusting our Dashboards from the "New Style" to the "New New Style". The layouts have changed and we have noticed performance problems causing additional testing and changes to the previous design. For example, it used to be that displaying a report on a Dashboard didn't cause the Dashboard to hang for seconds on load. Since the updates, we are removing reports from Dashboards to improve load time performance. One observation is the "Performance Monitor" doesn't work on Dashboards, so there is no low-code way to tell the Builder what is causing the load problem. In some Apps we have Dashboards that act as "single pane of glass" experiences for Roles and there are several Roles in the App. Diego, as well as others on the HMC Team are busy with these modifications. Stemming from a question of whether Dashboard tabs on top are an improvement, we moved away from introductions for a little bit. We talked about Give Feedback and some of the experiences with that feature of the Quickbase platform. Anyone who spends more that fifteen minutes looking at Give Feedback finds ideas that have been untouched for years, other ideas are closed almost immediately without a way to respond. Give Feedback is hard for Users to find and one cannot share links without problems for anyone who clicks the link. Lastly the frustration around convincing Quickbase Support there is a problem only to be told to go create a Give Feedback. This behavior makes the Customer have to duplicate the same work in two places. Nico was very nice and created a Give Feedback regarding the tabs on Dashboards taking up the space gained by removing the Global table bar (Quickbase giveth and Quickbase taketh away. :) Next Lee gave an update on progress last month to say he is traveling quite a bit. He did have a problem, which we got to after the updates portion of the meeting. Jen said last month was about trying to rework a summary report to pull averages from a specific static time period (which is not the native functionality). We did some brainstorming on better ways to get there with a formula, and she was able to sort it out the next day. No update on the Fastfield buildout. Finally she is excited about new mobile forms but needs embedded reports to be included before migration can begin. The builders who use embedded reports and Grid Edit all agreed this is a show stopper for migration. Jim has been working mostly in SQL updating a QuNect Stored Procedure to use unique fields to perform bulk imports. The goal is to reduce Integration Reads and speed up processes significantly. This is a long term transition as there are many automations using the loop method to add/update records, all which need to be switched to the bulk import method. Elena was excited to share something interesting. She showed her method of using an iFrame to load a Code Page that has features outside of the Quickbase feature set and also uses Parameters. The iframe displays a report. In the report is a button. When the button is clicked, it opens a pop-up window with a Drop Down List. The pop-up list looks modern and has some features like showing what is already selected. We talked about using "OpenAsAPopUp" and ifv but the limitations on native Quickbase Drop Down List styling could not be ignored. Pierce shared he is working on redirects. The challenges associated with getting redirects to work in different situations. Pierce is one of the newer Quickbase builders at HMC and has more SQL experience, which is greatly needed and appreciated. We then briefly talked about changing the Qrew meetup dates by advancing one week for November and December. The change was agreed upon unanimously. Next we moved on to a problem Lee wanted to work on. He has this complex formula that determines the editability of a field based upon a date range. Diego put a solution in the Teams chat that hopefully Lee can modify to meet the requirements. If not I have a feeling November PDX Qrew will be working on the formula, which sounds like a good time. We ended the meeting and called it a day. side notes: We often have this conversation about Quickbase UI/UX limitations. When a customer reaches the limits of Quickbase, one option is to move into Code Pages, if they decide to stick with Quickbase. There is a comprimise to Code Page or not to Code Page and each organization should consider this seriously. The queston is: If we move to Code Pages, we either need to get good at reading the language in the Code Page or Pay someone to help maintain it for us. I think it is an interesting long term conversation. I also think it is essential to have the Code Page as an option.October 23rd Portland Qrew Meetup 3PM
The Portland Qrew is meeting on the fourth Wednesday at 3PM PST at the Harder Mechanical Contractors offices in Portland, OR. The goal for this meetup is to collaborate and solve some problems. Afterwards with the weather being pleasant, it is possible we find ourselves drinking a pint. Anyone interested in attending via Teams, please email me directly at jharrison@harder.com and I will send a Teams invitation.September Portland Qrew Meetup Notes
September Portland Qrew meeting started at 3 PM PST on a beautiful fall day. Attendees were Lee Gilmore, Jonathan Miller, Jen Clarke, Jim Harrison. Elena Larabee and a couple last minute invites Jonathan thought would benefit from the experience (KennedyM (Wyoming/Montana), Ender (Denver Co)). In the end the last minute invites didn't make it but I wanted to make note of the invitation to track how this develops. After saying our hello's and introductions, then finding there were no collaboration problems to solve, we reviewed the past months progress. Starting with Lee explaining how he is working on last minute projects, trying to finish something for a customer, and so a little distracted. Having children who attend PPS we are well aware of in-service days where there is no school and Lee was attending remotely. Lee said he will be at next months meeting if all goes to plan. Jen talked about making preparations to building out a Mobile solution. Part of the month was spent comparing Quickbase versus FastField Forms on the iPad. It sounded like the conclusion is FastField is the path forward. Licenses are purchased and they started to learn the FastField UI. The project goal is to provide field representatives with the ability to enter work orders electronically. It's exciting to hear about the development of an electronic, wireless data entry and processing system custom built to the company's specifications. The amount of design that must go into what sounds like a simple project can be overwhelming. We are looking forward to hearing what Jen discovers and are standing by ready to assist and be awed at the design ingenuity. Elena talked about efforts with trying to move data between Domains. In this example, an iFrame in a QB Dashboard that opens an O365 scheduling tool ~ sort of what Tammie was working on previously. When a User clicks the scheduler, the Scheduler page is supposed to open. Instead there is an error because of a security feature in the browser to disable cross site scripting. Aside; for a while Website builders could steer Users away from one Website and to another Website. The method eventually was used to steer Users to nefarious Websites where data loss could happen. Browser builders put a stop to Cross Site Scripting and named it CORS and the Internet moved on. We talked about the inherent problems and shared the limited understanding we have of leveraging Oauth and other security methods to solve the problem. This problem is another of those "sounds easy" until you try it challenges most developers come across regularly. When Elena comes up with a working solution, we look forward to hearing how it was solved and taking notes. Elena also started on the path to discovering Jira www.atlassian.com a project management tool and is still in the early stages of determining how it's supposed to work. Next I shared my progress in the past month. My main focus has been updating stored procedures that use QuNect to sync data between different services in the environment. As is normal with managing data synchronization, there are always requests to add another field to the sync so some other process can be built out for some reason. My method when making these changes is to review field comments, and update notes as needed or where lacking. Over time it is much easier to manage complex systems if there are bread crumbs of knowledge. Also this month we had an amazing opportunity to bring together a large group of Users at Harder and talk about how they use the systems we have built. We called it the "PRIME Improvement Team" event. The event was 3 days of talking about PRIME (our custom Quickbase solution) and listening to our Users. The event was well received by all attendees with requests for more and a lot of new work for the development team based upon the conversation. Finally I shared my experience with the new Quickbase Support Website and gave a rundown on the plus deltas. We wound down the meeting talking about Forms, new style vs old style and form rules in general. Basically with old forms it was nice to have all the fields in a list to manipulate and a pita to manage form rules. We touched on the challenges to transitioning over to new forms. The difference in performance between the old and new forms (old forms are faster). Finally we discussed working and collaborating with development teams . When working with a team of developers there is an extra layer of responsibility amongst the team to ensure all are aware of standards and what everyone is doing. Having daily standups in an open blameless environment is critical to ensuring the team is comfortable working together. It is easy to go into your cave and only come out for food and bathroom breaks. Taking time on a daily basis to share with the team engenders creativity and collaboration. Finally Jonathan Miller, who is a new Quickbase employee and first time attendee, gave some plus deltas of the meeting. He volunteered to be the note taker (thank you) and wanted to invite more Quickbase builders to the meeting. It is impressive to see the level of professionalism Jonathan brings to the table and we are looking forward to working together moving forward. Below is my BMW 1979 R65 per a request from Jonathan. Looking East from the hills on the East side of Salem, OR.August Portland Qrew Meetup Notes
Attendees: Lee Gilmore, Jen Clark, Jim Harrison, Jonathan Moreno-Farias, Elena Larabee, Tammi King The meeting started by sharing what we have been working on this month. Jen is working on building a mobile experience for her field Users in FastField forms. She is hoping for Address fields in place of latitude longitude coordinates and also the ability to perform calculations in the forms. I am working on the testing the beta version of Document Template. I shared what the tool can and cannot do and areas where they are making improvements. Elena continues to work on making an automation for importing Pipelines across apps. The current challenge is how to replace the slug automatically. One discovery she shared was in place of the slug one can use quickbase[default] which fills in the default Pipelines connector token for the App when the Pipeline is imported. It's not a foolproof solution due to security issues with using the default token. It could work to exhibit a proof of concept. Sadly Lee did not join us in person as he wasn't feeling well. On top of that the Internet at Lees house was acting up. Because of these two factors, we didn't get an update from Lee. He did hang out and was able to hear what we discussed so hopefully he got some good cheer from our conversation. Tammie continues to work on the photoshoot app for her company. The App uses the EOTI method allowing Customers to request and appointment. Automaton then sets up the schedule in an internal App based upon the Photographers calendar. Once the shoot is scheduled, automation duplicates the schedule to the EOTI App. Finally the App sends a calendar invite to the Customer. Scheduling is a complex system with many moving parts. On top of building this process she also has to work with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook where there are constraints from IT. Jonathan is new to the Harder team and decided to join the meetup to listen in and decide if he is interested in future events. Next we talked about Pizza. There is a difference between West Coast compared to East of the Mississippi Pizza. Being from the Chicagoland area originally I have my opinion. Tammie also shared her experience with a local market in the Boston area that by the sound of it is a good place to get pizza when in Boston. Before we ended the meeting we talked about Empower Pro plans. I will see if we can arrange for an in-person event and will update the Portland Qrew in the coming weeks. After the event we headed to Izakaya Kichinto for Ramen and a conversation around good sci-fi fantasy TV shows to watch.August 28th Portland Qrew Meetup 3PM
The Portland Qrew is meeting on the fourth Wednesday at 3PM PST at the Harder Mechanical Contractors offices in Portland, OR. The goal for this meetup is to collaborate and solve some problems. Afterwards with the weather being pleasant, it is possible we find ourselves drinking a pint. Anyone interested in attending via Teams, please email me directly atjharrison@harder.com and I will send a Teams invitation.
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Come meet up with members of the Portland, Oregon Qrew here!Owned by: LeeGilmore, LeeGilmore1, and JimHarrisonCreated: 10 months ago
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