Govind Davis

On yet another application review with a prospective client the issue of potentially troublesome data entity relationships came up.  A number of our clients are existing QuickBase users who have made an initial attempt to design their applications and find that some assistance is needed.  The first thing we look at to understand their application requirements are the data entity relationships. This is done in the context of both their existing application as well as their general business requirement because often applications are not correctly designed to support the structure of the business information. One of the most common mistakes we see is when application designers build inflexible structures into their applications because of a lack of understanding of relational data.  During the client call mentioned above we saw that they had set up a table of Projects... (more)

The Good, Bad and Ugly of Technology Service Integration

We are rolling out a project next week that is really one of our crowning achievements as a small company.  The project involves replacing an out-dated and cumbersome Access database that runs a sales and loan process for our medium sized client with an end-to-end solution based on QuickBase.  What is most exciting is that we are integrating three external data sources as part of the process; web based application capture, credit reports and electronic signatures. Our recent adoption of the Talend ETL technology to run our integrations has opened the door for us to tackle this pr... (more)

Intuit QuickBase: Best Practices for Application Clusters

Data Sharing Features Detailed below are three main ways that applications share data. The purpose of this article is not to detail the technical configuration of these features, but to explain their intended use, benefits, and risks. Cross Application Relationships (Cross App) Cross Apps allow a table in one QuickBase application to be shared to another application. The shared table, in effect, acts like a table in the shared-to application, even though it actually resides in another application. This has the benefit of allowing data into a single table and not having to re-enter ... (more)

PaaS and the Cloud Continuum

We were recently Tweeted an inquiry about what exactly cloud computing means.  If you are listening in to tech chatter these days it's impossible to avoid the flurry of opinions about what the cloud is. So ... we figured we might as well add our two cents and spent a thought provoking morning developing a cloud stack analogy. Cloud services tend to fit into the category of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) or IaaS(Infrastructure-as-a-Service), each one delivering a service that encompasses the stack components below.  So, IaaS provides everything needed ... (more)

PaaS & ETL in the Application Ecosystem

Our conversation continues about the optimal mix of technology to support business process.  In "Living IT, QuickBase Leads The Way", we discussed the concept of Living IT and why organizations should plan for changing and dynamic technology.  To elaborate further on this topic we want to introduce some ideas around what we refer to as the the Application Ecosystem and how technologies such as PaaS and ETL fit in. Core Systems The Application Ecosystem of an organization is a broad way to refer to the various technology tools that the organization uses.  This applies to governme... (more)