Fast Field

Fastfield is a mobile first product.  But you need to understand that it's a stand alone product where the  the "integration" with your Quickbase app is via Pipelines in the sending direction to FastFields and the equivalent of a Pipeline using a Fast Fioeld "automation" (I forget what its called) to send the record back to Quickbase.  . 

A typical use case is to "dispatch" a record to FastField (via a pipeline) and that would cause a record to appear on the field technician's Fast Field App. The geoocation can be captured along with pictures which can be annotated  and marked up with drawing tools, ands then the Field Technician would submit the form and the Equivalent of a Pipeline on the FF side will write the record back to Quickbase.

Sometime in Q1 they expect to have better support for maintaining the Parent tables in Fast Field.  So for example if the Field Tech needs to select from a drop down of choices where the source of truth is Quickbase, there is not an easy way to keep that parent table updated in Fast Fields.  Quickbase  knows that's a deficiency and they plan to address it with new Pipeline step choices in Q1 2024.

I had a meeting and was demoing fast field. The first thing to realize is, there are two types of mobile integrations.

1. Simply using Quickbase on your phone. This is just the equivalent to the mobile forms we can make (but as we all hope, updated at some point in our lives).

2. Submitting a single form via mobile. 

Fast forms is number 2. It is NOT a way to just view QB and use QB on mobile.

The good:
It is really slick in its design and layout, and usage. I think it's really well done as a single submission form. Full marks here.

The bad:
Literally everything else. It is ONLY designed as a form submission. It is dreadfully expensive, and charges per submission. I wanted a better mobile experience for our field techs. For me to switch to Fast Forms, because of the fact that they need to be able to submit, then possibly re-edit their submission, that would count as another 'submission'. I estimated it would cost me 100-250k (yes a quarter of a million dollars) per year to implement. You also have to integrate yourself via a pipeline.

If you are looking at fast field, I would also look at https://www.advantagequickbase.com/

I worked with these guys a bit and they are AWESOME people with a great product. I was never able to get funding to use them, and I always felt bad about that because they really tried hard to help me. They deserve the business for sure. They are also in category 2, a form submission charged per form. But better pricing and the apis are built in, no need for pipelines. To be fair, fast field really has the best mobile interface, but Advantage is worth a look.

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Mike Tamoush
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