QuickBase Is a Quick Study

Mike Hogan, special to PCWorld.com

If you've ever worked for a large corporation, you may have enjoyed the benefits of sharing contact lists, budgets, calendars, project schedules, and e-mail threads with other workgroup members over Lotus Notes. But what if you work in a smaller company that can't afford an expensive, complicated collaborative database?

Now there's a new way for you and your team members to put your heads together: Intuit is hosting its QuickBase data manager for small enterprises on the Web.

Data managers like Lotus Notes were created in the client/server era and required programmers with specialized training to administer them and servers with massive amounts of storage to run them. And individual users had to have a client version installed on their desktops.

But QuickBase uses the application service provider model: All you need is an Internet connection and a Web browser, and you can skip the equipment and IT costs. QuickBase takes advantage of the Web's being a universal (and fairly quick) communications backbone--so you don't have to incur capital equipment or management costs. Your data resides on Intuit's secure servers; using any late-model Web browser, you can view or download just the report, table, chart, or other bit of information you need.

QuickBase is free to all database viewers and to creators of three or fewer databases. The service costs $14.95 monthly for up to 15 databases and $49.95 per month for 16 to 50 databases. It's free to everyone for 90 days from the time of registration.

QuickBase offers a surprising number of database-creation options to get you started in minutes. If you're new to working with databases or if you just don't want to start from scratch, QuickBase offers more than 20 templates for common database tasks such as contact management, call logs, personnel or event tracking, and project management. You can import a database of your own from your hard drive, copy information from a Microsoft Word table or Excel spreadsheet via the Windows Clipboard, or just clone one of the site's many samples. Matching fields between applications can be tricky, but QuickBase walks you through it.

Manipulate and Share

QuickBase is surprisingly fast for a Web-based application. I found it to be full-featured and responsive to queries from a 1000-record database, even over a dial-up Net connection.

QuickBase doesn't try to match the sophisticated record and report design of a transactional database like Oracle; instead it emphasizes ease of use, much the way FileMaker does. Your data is displayed in clean-looking Web pages that contain only the task options you need in that context. Tools and commands take the form of conveniently placed buttons, Web links, and pull-down menus.

Even though the interface is simple, you still have considerable data manipulation and viewing choices. Some fields can even contain popular spreadsheet formulas for budgetary, statistical, and other calculations. There are also project-oriented formulas that let you make calculations such as converting a range of days into dates.

Intuit borrows common browser navigation cues--Home, Favorites, Back, and Next-- and all your databases are grouped under folder tabs like those in Notes, Quicken, or QuickBooks. QuickBase give its folders the labels "News," "Samples," "My Recent," "My Favorites," and "Owned."

The "Owned" label refers to databases you've created, and it's the foundation upon which QuickBase's record-level access control system is built. If you're an owner, you can determine which individuals get to view, change, or add to databases that you own. You can share data with coworkers, offsite business associates, or even the public at large over a Web site. Many enterprises want more control over the dissemination of their data than that, so Intuit plans to add administrative tools in the months ahead.

QuickBase's simple, familiar Web interface makes it a quick study. But one downside is that every action causes the page to redraw. And of course, unless you've downloaded your data to your PC, your access to your data is only as reliable as your Internet connection; if you experience frequent service provider outages, you could be cut off from your data.

Business moves quickly these days--project teams coalesce and dissolve on a dime. If you need speed and flexibility in your collaboration tools, and you'd rather focus on the work than on designing your workgroup's information manager, QuickBase is a cheap and easy answer.