Name: How to go from App Inheritance to App Ownership
Uploaded: 2025-03-20T18:31:04.515Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 24 s
Description: How to go from App Inheritance to App Ownership

Transcript for "How to go from App Inheritance to App Ownership": Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our From App Inheritance to Ownership webinar, from a part of our unlocking your Quickbase success series. We will get started in just a minute. We're letting people have another second or two to trickle in and join us for the webinar today. I just wanted to give everyone a quick, heads up. As you're in the chat with us, you can chat, and let us know if there's anything you need help with in the chat box. Right above that, you'll also see options for documents and q and a. Under documents, you're gonna find a bunch of the links and helpful topics you might be interested in learning more about, things like the workbook that goes along with our app inheritance and other things like that. And then q and a is where you can actually put questions. We'll have a q and a section at the very end where we can go over if there's anything that you wanna dig into a little bit deeper from today's presentation. Lastly, I'd like to let everybody know this will be available on demand. So even if you have to jump in the middle or if there's someone you wanna share this with on your team, you can find it on demand at quickbase.com/events, or you can also find it just on demand, in your the email that you received with your invite once we're once the webinar is over. Alright. It looks like right now, we've got a decent number of people who joined us, so let's get started on our webinar today. So you're maybe wondering, so app inheritance ownership, what are we really talking about? So but, really, this webinar is for you if you have recently inherited a Quickbase app or suite of apps, or if you've recently have actually been handed the keys to an entire Quickbase account and you're finding out you're finding yourself wondering, like, what do I do with all of these apps? I've kind of inherited work that somebody else started, and I have to figure out how to catch up. And so, like, what I what I love to do is start on a, these webinars off is just basically ask, like, who here has actually recently inherited, an app or suite of quick based apps and is figuring out, like, what to do. So you'll see a poll on the screen. You'll be able to give us your answers while waiting for a few more people to funnel in. Just let us know. Like, are you was the person in picking up a single app? Did you get a bunch of apps? Did you get a whole account? This just helps me figure out, like, who are we gonna talk to? What kind of questions are we gonna get today? And I'll give everyone a second to answer that while we have folks getting settled. Looks like we've got a lot of folks who inherited a few apps. Oh, and then and then a couple with just an app, a few account folks. So give everyone a minute. Alright. And I'll leave that Palle poll open so that folks can keep answering, but I'll keep going with the end of the poll section, but I'll keep going with the presentation. So what's our goal today? You've inherited snaps. You wanna know what to do. How are you gonna help you figure out more of, how to get comfortable with your inherit with and confident after you inherited these apps. We're gonna share our framework. We have a great framework that we we like to use to help folks break down sort of what should I be doing and where should I be going in my, first thirty, sixty, and ninety days. We are also gonna talk a little bit about some of the tools you could be using to help you, both some techniques inside of your app as well as some resources you should be pulling from, and then help you move forward by clarifying some of the next steps you can take with your inherited apps. This is gonna be a little bit about getting into the apps themselves, but also a little bit about if you're not confident as a quick base builder yet, how do you get confident? So we have our our like I said, our framework is in the first one to thirty days, you're gonna be getting control. In your first thirty to sixty days, you're gonna try to be getting really clear on what you have and what you need, and then getting the sixty to ninety is about getting creative. It's asking yourselves, well, I've kind of figured out what's working and what's not working. How do I start addressing what's not working? In particular, the stuff that's, like, high on my list of priorities and stopping my account from being successful. And then after those ninety days is where we you ideally, you should start to feel a little bit more comfortable and you should be in the staying current mode, which is basically keeping your apps up to date, but also staying up to date on Quickbase. We we release stuff most every month that is kind of making little changes or tweaks to Quickbase, some big, some small. This is how you start to think about how do you stay up to date with all those and you'd be able to really easily say, I want this. I need this in my app, or I can wait a little bit longer until I add this to my workflow. So, we're gonna start with the getting control, and this section is really relevant for those of you who said you inherited a whole account. We start there. If you didn't inherit an account, this section might have a little bit less for you. If you're just a single app or a couple of apps, admin. You're gonna really the, like, the next section especially. So we'll jump in here, though. So in the first one to thirty days under getting control, really important is to understand your organization. So, it might be that you represent a single department or a single team in your org, but a lot of your org uses Quickbase and now you're responsible for an app or pieces of it or multiple apps. This is how you're understanding what's your quick what's your account doing with Quickbase. You're getting to know what your actual Quickbase account is set up, identifying the apps that are your highest priorities, and then starting to learn the fundamentals. You may be experienced as a Quickbase user. You may be in the deep end and be like, I've barely used Quickbase, and I'm responsible for naps. We're still gonna go over a couple of things that you could be doing in your first thirty days to help you get to the the confidence that you need. So we're gonna start by getting a good organization of or we recommend you start by getting a good understanding of your organization. Where what are your goals today? What is your most every account starts quick base with some kind of plan. They either have a really burning need that they want to jump to, and that was sort of the first app or apps they built. Maybe they have multiples. It can be really helpful even if you're only the manager for a single app or a couple apps, not a whole account, to ask yourself, like, what is my company really wanting to accomplish with Quickbase? Because that might help you understand if your app is, like, a high priority app where you have other people in the organization you should be talking to because they're gonna be able to tell you what that app needs to do. Or if maybe you're working on, like, a project that's an expansion opportunity where you have a little more creative freedom, you can kind of work things the way you want. You also wanna know what challenges you face. This could be challenges your company has, whether it is recent changes to your priorities, changes to your organization, perhaps it's even just challenges in the individual, uses of Quickbase you have. Maybe the app that you're using is in response to another app that needed work. Maybe it's in response to helping a specific group of folks who just wanted to get started using Quickbase and they they unfortunately lost their champion and you've kinda stepped into the the the arena? Or lastly, what are your processes? This has a lot to do with, does your organization use other tools that are supposed to integrate or work with Quickbase? Are there various teams working on on this app that maybe you aren't familiar with yet? And then we say, like, let's dig in and learn a little bit more about your Quickbase account. So, you've you've gotten a little bit know to know a little bit more about your organization, what you want out of Quickbase. Base. This is getting to know a little bit more about Quick Base itself. This is getting to know the folks at Quick Base who are here to help you, your account team, some of the resources we have available, and how you can learn about your plans and your usage and the way you think about using Quick Base. So first off, there's an account team. There are folks here at Quickbase, who are here to help you. We have your account executive who is basically the person you talk most often when it comes to your commercial conversations. This is the these are the folks that'll help you with the original sale, if you just recently bought Quickbase, or they might help you with questions you just have around, like, what kind of use what, what what is my plan entitlements and things like that. There's your renewal specialist to work with your account executive to help you when it comes time for renewal. They'll give you extra attention and basically talk you through what is in this renewal. Do I wanna renew for the same? Do I have increased needs for Quickbase? And then next would be technical support. Our technical support engineers are here to help you with your product questions and resolve your issues. If you are a new app admin and you find yourself struggling to know how to use a feature or engage with something, these folks are here to really help you. They have a great deal of knowledge about Quickbase the platform. They can help you figure out if what right features you should be using, if you've ran into a bug perhaps or bad experience. And they are just a the technical support case away. Next, you can find our your customer success manager and your service team. They not every account has one of these available or assigned to them at all times, but we we try to make sure we give everybody as much support as we can. Your customer success manager is basically here to help you have get your most value out of Quickbase. They serve as your adviser. They help give you advice on how you could expand if there's a new use case you're trying to unlock with your team. If there's something that's keeping you from being, as successful as you wanna be, they are great folks to have a conversation with. And then, lastly, the services team, we offer services here at Quickbase for those folks who either wanna get set up or have special projects. Those would be the people who provide that kind of guidance and can help you build, optimize, and integrate your applications. You can purchase service in a lot of different ways. It could be that you just want someone to help with a specific project. It could be that you want kind of, like, in-depth. That's something that you can discuss with the account executives that we talked about earlier, on this slide. And that's a little bit about who you can expect to be working with kind of on a regular basis, a quick basis. There's a lot of other folks in the company who you can run them into, but they are sort of your day to day, team. And then getting to know a little bit more about your resources. So we have a bunch of tools, and that can be really helpful but can also feel a little overwhelming. So when we think about leveraging these tools to get support, there are a couple of great places. You can learn about the Quickbase product through our on demand courses in our Quickbase University. We also offer customer led classes and Quickbase certification. Certification is really when you're ready to kick it up a notch. You wanna make sure that not only do you have the skills, but you can show it off, with your certification. And then if you need, like I mentioned a little bit earlier, with our technical support team, there you can always open a case with them. You can also search our online help, which is a sort of like your user's manual to Quickbase, and we have office hours available. Very similarly to sort of these webinars, they're available for you so you can jump in and get a little help from a Quickbase expert. We have a Quickbase community or crew, which both exists as a community website and forum where you join with chat with other folks. But we also do, offer our crew networks, which are opportunities for you to meet with other folks like you and chat a little bit about your experiences, attend an event, share some ideas. And then lastly, the you can always partner with us. So people like your CSMs could help you create a value realization plan. That's where they take those challenges and goals your organization had that we were talking about a little bit earlier and turn those into a plan with you. How are you gonna do that? How are you gonna break that all that that big piece of work into more manageable pieces, and where can we help? You can also talk a little bit about the, impacts of your applications, work with our services team. There's a lot of resources out there that exist for folks like you wherever you are in your journey in Quickbase. And so now we're gonna pivot a little bit. You're, in your account. You're new to it. You've started to think a little bit about the folk what your goals are and who you could talk to a quick base to help you with that. Now let's think about how can you get a kind of like a pulse on your account. And so one of the first things you can do is review your admin console. If you're an account admin, you have access to this to let you see sort of all the, details about your Quickbase account, what plan are you on, which kinda dictates what features you have access to, how many users do you have, basically lets you know how many people you could have actively assigned using Quickbase account. This is also a place where you can find all the information on your account, what apps are available, what users you've invited, what groups you've created. Like, this is gonna serve as a, like, tome on all the things in your account. In particular, really important if you're an account admin is reviewing what they what's the permissions tab. It's one of the tabs available on your admin console. It'll help you identify who else is an admin in your account. The biggest thing here is anyone else who's an account admin should be listed here, with a full permissions as an admin. They might be great folks if you're feeling overwhelmed to go to and say, like, I need help. Or you might realize they're the folks that you took over for, and they might just need to be removed if they're no longer supposed to be admins. You can also check here for some other important things. Who has create permissions in your account? This basically dictates who else can create apps. So you can find out if there's other people creating apps. Either many accounts are set to everyone can create. There's also a lot of accounts that are set to only a specific list of people have the permissions to create your applications. This is a great thing to know if you're a new admin. It'll help you figure out how many folks you need to wrangle or follow-up with to make a plan. And then from there, along with permissions, you could actually see the apps tab, and this is where you can learn more about your account. You can find out who the manager of the app is. You can find out the name. You can find out a little bit about its activity. What's really handy is if, you're in one of those accounts where there's a lot of apps and it feels a little daunting, you can also export this and turn it into a little Quickbase app of your own and start using it to take notes on, like, this app I know what's going on, this app I don't. It's a little it's a little meta to use Quickbase to help you manage Quickbase, but it can be really helpful if you're trying to sort of tackle and break apart what you know about each app. And then, you can also check to see what I recommend heavily, checking to see if your any of your apps are shared publicly. What this means is that at some point, someone decided that they wanted either a part of your app or all of your app to be, public facing. So if a person was given or sent a link to your app, they could look into it. A real common use case for this is you might have a ticketing app where you have folks who are outside of your organization, vendors, customers, partner organizations come in, and they might just have permissions to add a record, but not see any of the anybody else's records. Why this is super helpful to know is that those public apps tend to be one since they're facing other people, customers, vendors, organizations. They might just be that might put them really high on your priority list to look into and make sure you understand how they work. And that kinda goes into figuring out your priorities. You probably you can use all this information you've collected to help you prioritize your apps. You might be really lucky, and you have one, two, three, but there are definitely folks who have come in and inherited twenty, thirty apps and need to figure out, like, which one needs the most attention now. I need to triage. And so some really important factors to consider are, what are the apps that have the most users, that are serving the most people? What has the most usage? What has the largest size? So has contains the most of my data. What has, no active app manager? So you might look at that list of, email addresses of who manages each app, and off the top of your head, may you may be able to say, like, oh, Kelly left. You know, Kelly, left the company six months ago. Has no one been keeping up on the customer service app? I wanna put that really high on my priority list and make it one of the ones I check really soon. And then lastly, I also, like I said, recommend looking what is shared publicly. If the shared publicly apps may not need a lot of attention, right away, but they are definitely apps I always try to keep in the back of my mind is, like, that one's customer facing. I wanna make sure I at least like what it looks like. And then, you know, this kinda gives you a great starting point. You've got a list of apps. You know who's in charge of them. You know how many users they're using. You can start to break this problem apart and say like, oh, a couple of these apps are very small and we have a couple users. Maybe they're just starter apps. Maybe they're tests. Maybe they're things that were work in progress and aren't live today. But it might be really easy to say, like, oh, my asset management application serves 60 users. That's a really high priority for me. And that will get help you get a your mind around, like, what's going on in my account? And, that kinda takes us to a little plug I have. But, if you are a new account admin and you're like, I have no idea how to start breaking apart understanding what all is going on, we also have an offering for anybody who's on a business or app plan to use our governance core apps. You can find them right in the quick base exchange. They let you use the admin our admin console sync to pull a ton of information on the usage of your apps, your user activity, and basically help you to manage all of them in a way that's a little bit easier. You can find a link to that in our docs. I won't take too much time up, but I like to let folks know, if you're feeling like you're starting to get the basics of managing your account, but you need to know more, perhaps you're an IT team or you need to work through IT team, these apps are available. They are out there for you. And then I let the basically, that's kind of gives you an idea of that's in your first thirty days. How can you start tackling the question of, like, what is set up in my Quickbase account? Now we can now you're also probably thinking, how can I start sharpening my skills? Maybe I am not confident in Quickbase. Maybe I'm very new to it. Let's get into, how like, how university could help you. Firstly, I'd love to ask, like, how comfortable do folks feel right now with using using Quickbase? Or is it something that you have a high skill ranking in, or is it something that you think you're just you're really new to it? And I'm gonna open another poll for everybody if folks just wanna put in their own, experience level. Like, how confident do you feel today? Nice. I'm seeing a lot of people starting to put in that they feel pretty comfortable using Quickbase in their day to day. Good. It's it's good to hear. I see some folks who are saying that they're still getting started, need to build your skills. What's What's great is some of the content we're gonna chat about in there's gonna be in each section, we'll have some courses we could we can take that'll help you bring those skills sort of to the next level. And if I haven't seen anyone say no. They do not feel comfortable using Quickbase yet. If you are out there and you don't feel comfortable, didn't wanna answer, we will cover those lessons as well for those of you who don't feel like you have gotten comfortable with Quickbase yet. That's fair. Yeah. I think a lot of people, feel like they fit a bit between that. I'm just getting started, but I'm really comfortable using Quickbase, and it might be that there's certain features or things that are really tricky. What's helpful is we do have resources out if there's any of those specific topics that are kind of keeping you from feeling confident. Alright. So I'll keep going, and I'll leave that one open a little bit longer if anybody else wants to add theirs in. So, if you're feeling like your skills could use a little work, even if you're a pro, maybe you have something you wanna learn, you can do that with our university. We offer live trainings, on demand trainings, and then certification, like I mentioned earlier, which is sort of putting a stamp on your skill set and saying, like, I know I'm here. And I can also show it to others, whether it be my organization, whether it be, future jobs that I go looking for. These certifications just let people know that you're you're a quick based expert. You got you you have the skill. Also, I would recommend for those of you who feel like you're pretty new, if you haven't seen it before, but you really want, like, a crash course in app building, we have our quick base quick start course. It is about one hour to learn to build an app, and it will take you through basically the setup of of a plan of the basic idea of an app through to having created the starter point. This can be really great if you started off as a user of Quickbase, but being admin's a little new for you. It'll take you through a crash course, and you'll be able it's on demand, so you can kinda take it at your own pace and also refer back to it. And if you're looking for, some extra help, if you would like a live training, which is an option we do have available, there are some workshops that are out there. We recommend there's Galactic App Ventures, which is all about app building, for beginners. There's some end user reporting, which is making reporting for others. And then lastly, Sweet Connections, which is all about building relationships, which are really core to Quickbase. And they kinda just they're out there for you to help. And I'm glad to hear that the Quickbase team usually helped you, Angie, because that is definitely there's some there's some skills you can really pick up there, especially at your own pace while you're thinking about using your applications. So moving on, you know, that's you've gotten certain gotten to know your account a little bit better. Maybe you've just started asking folks what your plans for Quickbase are, what you wanna do, started to figure out what users and apps or what maps matter most to you, if there's other admins. We're gonna move on to the thirty to sixty day getting clear. Also, for some of you who just inherited an app or two, this might be where you start. You may spend less time. You may not need the full thirty days for getting to know your account better. You may also not have may not be patient enough to wait for the full thirty days. This is where it gets into actually saying, like, let's dig into your priority apps and figure out what's going on inside of them, and then let's take my education to the next level once I know what I don't feel comfortable building or supporting right now. And so when we're digging deep deeper into those priority apps, great place to start, what was the app built to do? That but it might seem counterintuitive. You might say to yourself, well, duh, I should know what my apps are for, but a lot of people realize that an app might serve more than one team, more than one person, even if they have only ever used it for themselves for one reason. So it's really helpful to figure that out. Also, how is the app set up? What what is how is it built? Does it have many tables and many relationships? Does it use an integration with another system? And then lastly, how are people using the app? This is really important because what the app was built for and how people are using it could be one of the reasons why you're struggling to understand what the app is for because it might be that those two things don't align. It may be that the app was meant to be built to serve these three teams, but now these three other teams have started using Quickbase as well, and they're not finding the stuff that they need. Maybe the reports aren't built right for them and they're constantly having to look for information. Maybe the dashboards aren't correct for them, and they've just sort of been added in. That can be a really good thing for you to dial into really early as a builder to figure out, like, this app is not just for this purpose, but it's maybe missing the mark on some of the things it's for. And so when we're thinking about all that stuff, we talk a lot about design intent, which is like, how does the owner of the system expect it to work? Every app is designed to to address a specific problem or a specific workflow in your organization, but over time, that can evolve, and your apps are supposed to change along with it. It might be that for a long period of time, you had only a single team who managed all of your customers, but now you're starting to break into regions, and you're starting to ask yourself questions about, like, how do I make sure that my team of 20 is running as smoothly and quick base as my team of five sales reps that I used to have? And so, like, understanding what the app was built for can kinda help you figure out, is it needing that today, and is there anything you need to do in the short term to make sure that it gets there? So how do you do that? It can be a little tricky. You inherited these apps. Maybe no one left you any instructions at all about what they were for. Obviously, it's great if you could talk to the original app builder. Maybe they just moved teams, changed focus, passed you with this on because you are taking coming into a new role. You can ask them why don't they build the app and where is it at in their experience. You can ask the other admins in your account, and I'll actually explain how you can find those folks, or sorry, in the app. I'll actually explain how you can find those folks a little bit later. You can talk to the stakeholders. These are the business people that yeah. These are the the teams that are really involved in this application. Great example of from what we were using before is if a sales teams were in here, this would potentially be like the manager of the sales team. Maybe he doesn't go into the app every day or she doesn't go into the app every day, but they have a really strong perspective on what their team should be doing in the app. And then lastly, you have your end users. These are everybody that the app that is using the app. This could be in the case of a normal app, those members of the sales team, your CSMs, your engineers, your leadership, but it could also be with those public apps and why I always consider those shared publicly actually important. This could be customers or vendors, and you may wanna make sure that they're seeing an experience that matches what you want them to see. So you might wanna touch base with them if they're using that app and be like, hey. I I know you use this to submit work orders to us or to let us know when a machine is broken. Is that working for you the way you want it to? And, ideally, fingers crossed, they will say yes. But sometimes they'll be like, oh, there's a field missing or there's a piece of information I don't have. That can be a really easy win really early on for you and help you build a little bit of a relationship with them. And so now it's sort of like, now I know there's some folks I should talk to. How can I start figuring out who these people are? Well, we've right inside your application, when you're in it, if you go to the app settings, there's a section called roles. If you look into your roles, you can get a better sense of who's using your app and who might be a good person to connect with. So, Quickbase by default usually gives you some kind of admin role, some kind of viewer role, some kind of team member role for every app. You can customize these, make your own app, make your own roles, give them whatever names and permissions you want. There's a lot of flexibility in here to say these this role should only see these three tables. This role should see these five. This role is the managers. They should see everything. So this can help you start to peel apart those layers of figuring out who's using your account. You can look at the, name of the roles and see, do they align up to names of, teams or team members you have today? Do any of them have admin permissions like you? What can be really helpful is if you find other folks in the admin role, maybe they're admins you didn't know about who could give you information about the app, or maybe they're folks that, shouldn't be admins anymore. Maybe when you inherited the app, you realize that no one's been cleaning up and removing all the old admins as they moved out. This is a great opportunity to make sure that, like, only the right folks have the keys to the app in their hands. And then from there, you can also look in the users table, which is available, on the little navigation bar for your app, like its own table, which will let you know all the users who have access to your application and will tell you what role they're in. This can be handy because if you know some of the people on the list or you work with them, you can say, oh, I know Jennifer. She is in this admin role. I will go chat with her about her experience. Or I know Scott. He is in my, you know, like, field off field operations role. I can figure out what is he using this app for. And then from there, you can also sort like I was mentioning, do you know the other admins? There might be other admins already in your app. So you could look to them and kind of have a chat around. Do they have any idea why where the app is now? Was there any work that was left undone by whoever owned it previously? You should also look, we have, like I mentioned, the built in administrator app, but with custom roles, you could have a lot of people with admin permissions. If you check this column here, admin level permissions, looking for anybody that has admin permissions can be really handy in case there are multiple roles that have them. And then also what's helpful to know is next to it is sharing. Those are the folks who are able on their own to share the app. They can only share the app at their level, so they if they're not an admin, they can't give someone admin permissions, but they might be able to invite another person to also be a team member. That could either be really good because they can help you bring users in without you needing to be involved, or if they shouldn't have those permissions, this is a great chance to be like, should I just have this app be able to share to my other team, or do I need to keep it a little bit more under control? And then lastly, you can also you should also check out their home page. This could be a real wealth of information for you as a new admin. Everybody who has a role in it gets a dashboard, and that is that very first page you see when you sign into Quickbase, into Quickbase app that has all those reports and ideally has a lot of reports and information that's really relevant to your role, checking the, default dashboard for everybody can give you an idea of if they're seeing what they what they're supposed to see on a day to day, which can let you know what kind of data they're looking for it at or what tables they're interested in. It can also be a great opportunity when you talk to somebody about their, the application to say, well, right now your dashboard shows our lead pipelines by status. Your monthly activities has a easy search bar for companies. Does that work with what you do? And they may say, oh, yeah. Like, I like those two reports because they're what I do, but I don't add companies. Like, I have I I don't work at the company level. So that can be a really great conversation starter. So you don't just feel like you're going to someone and saying, like, hey. What do you do in this quick based app? You can instead say, like, hey. I know you're using this dashboard that has these reports. Like, is that working for what you do day to day? And then lastly, when you start connecting with your users, it'd be like the same thing. You don't wanna just kinda go and say, what do you do with Quickbase? You might instead wanna start to break it down into, like, how do they use the app? What do they do with the app? How often do they visit the app can be really helpful for you. Some folks might say every day. Some folks might say once a month, to just fill out a report. You can also identify ways to, make the app better. This usually centers a lot around, like, what's easy to use right now? Why or why not? What else do you wish the app could do? I find that this usually gets a lot of folks talking. I I think a lot of people usually have tons to share around. Is there little tweaks or changes that would make their day easier? Perhaps there's a form that they use every day that has a bunch of fields they never fill in, so it's really frustrating for them to have all that stuff kind of there when it could be much smaller and easier to use. And then also you can talk about, like, walk let them walk you through the process. Super valuable. They say, can we jump on a screen share? Can you walk me through putting in a support request in our support app? Can you walk me through creating a new company? Whatever they say they do, you can kinda watch over their shoulder and watch how they do it and get a feel for, like, does it match what you would expect? Is there parts of the process they don't they don't enjoy or take longer than they should? This can be a really awesome way to find out if there's paths in your app or workflows in your app that just don't make sense or to get familiar with them so you don't accidentally break them later while you're making changes. And I've so the thinking about that, have any of you started to have these discussions with your end users? Have you started having chats around what the app is for, what it, and who how it's being used? I'm just gonna throw another poll out quick if folks want to put their responses in. And I know we've been going for about a half hour, so this is a great opportunity to also deposit and say, is there any questions anyone's had on, figuring out, like, finding some users in their apps to talk to about their apps, usage? And we'll have q and a at the end as well, so don't feel like you have to ask questions now. We will be able to come back to it too. Alright. So we're seeing a few people who have talked to multiple users. Don't worry if you haven't started talking to folks yet or, if you're just starting. There's usually if you kind of follow the, workbook we have, there's a couple of suggested questions is there as well and some ways to, note down these changes. So they're a great opportunity to to touch base. And I see I had a couple questions come in. I see that Takeshi had a question around best practices on app documentation. There are some. I will find them for you when we get to the q and a section at the end. I just had to go looking for them really quick. I don't have them on top of my mind. And then for empower sessions that work well with app inheritance, I would say that it's always great to check-in on the governance based sections, if you are inherited both apps and accounts because those will tell you all the new tools you have to help manage your applications. There's a couple of really cool things coming out in Power that are really relevant for app admins that I would say, like, don't miss out on those, that are going to be more in that realm of, governing your account and expanding it. And then for language for creating customer facing formula. That's a great question, Angie. So Quickbase actually has its own formula language. It's very similar to common, like, visual basic language. So when you see it, you'll be it'll look pretty familiar. If you Google Quickbase formula functions guide, there is a guide that we have that walks through all of the formula functions available. We also have a bunch of training in the university on formulas, and, we should be running once we try to run fairly regularly a formulas one zero one webinar that you might wanna try checking out as well. Alright. So that's the questions we have. So we'll keep going so we don't, we run out of time. Just find my spot again. And that's going to be so we've we started talking to users, and we started to get their opinions and feelings and experiences. Flip the other side of that is you might wanna just know about the actual structure, and a great way to do that is to check your app's relationship diagrams. Within your app, you can find that by going into the app settings, and there's a section called app management. If you have an app that you're getting comfortable with and you haven't looked at app management yet, highly recommend it. You can find stats, your relationship diagram. You can find a bunch of information on all of the file attachments and emails and notifications that are in the app. There's a ton of really helpful information in there that you can kinda get at the app level. But if you go into the relationship diagram, it will give you a visual diagram of the tables and relationships in your app. It'll essentially let you know I have a customer's table and it is related to a project's table. Gives you a nice broad view. You can kinda get an idea of what key tables exist in your application, and you can figure out what relationships exist. And those are all kind of just represented with those little arrows. Basically, whoever's on top is the pit whoever has it starts the arrow is the parent. Whoever is bottom of the arrow is the child. What that means is meant my customers can have many projects, but I don't it doesn't go the other direction. Every project is only related to a single customer. What's also helpful here is some apps have chosen to hide, tables from various roles, including the admin role because they have a lot of them, and they just wanna make it really simple to navigate. This will reveal any hidden tables. So it'll be easier to see if there's any tables you're missing, but do something important that are hidden away from you and who they're related to. Great information for if you're stumbling if you're stumbling. Ideally, your relationship app will look like your relationship diagrams will look like this. Sometimes they will look like this, and they'll be really complicated and can seem really scary. They're often not as bad as they look. This is a very rare Franken app. Basically, an app that's a little bit bigger than you'd want it to be and isn't quite ideal. If you've inherited one of these, don't worry. There is definitely a ways out of this. A lot of times when you start peeling them apart, you realize people weren't always great about deleting old tables or old processes that they're not using anymore, especially if this app is older. And that's when you can start talking to users and discover, does anyone use this table? Does anyone use this relationship? Oh, we haven't for five years, and we've just been keeping the data for records. Like, can we can we export this into a a spreadsheet and just get rid of it? You know, don't always feel like you have to keep everything as part of your, inheritance. Sometimes there's opportunities to say, like, I need to pause this part of the app until I have time to go go back to it. And so relationship diagrams, they're a great starting point. A full diagram that kinda helps you get a better understanding of your app. I've seen people print them out. I've seen people make their own. And if you have, Miro or Lucid Charts, It can be a great opportunity for you to take that diagram, make your own, and start filling in this table does this. This table does this. These folks use this table. Like, it's a great way to start documenting, building them. And what that could kind of lead you to is, you know, like, as of right now, that diagram doesn't tell you what's on each table data wise or what information moves between the tables. You can start capturing that information. So while you're diagramming, you write out their names, think of the information you want. So customers might contain customer names, titles, phone numbers, emails, and they link to product. And what only the only thing that comes down to product is the name of that customer. Maybe it's more. Maybe it's their address. Maybe it's the, their preferred contact methods, things like that that can be pulled over. Starting to note that down can help you figure out the parts of the app that you don't wanna break. So if you if your customers have a customer name field and it gets passed on to your projects field, you wanna be careful with that prod customer name because it's now being shared across multiple tables. And, ideally, what you'll end up with is something pretty close to this example where you can see that customers are related to projects, projects might have documents, expenses, and tasks, time cards exist on the side related to tasks, and you have a team member's table. And doing this can really help you figure out, like, this is the core of my app. This is the things that I wanna make sure data wise pass successfully. And what can be helpful too is sort of, if you start building this app this diagram where you're talking to cost to your, team members, you can show them this diagram and be like, today, this is sort of what it does. These are the tables you're using. Do you use all of this? And they may say, yeah. I use everything in here. Or they might be like, oh, no. We stopped tracking expenses on the projects table, and we do it in a different app now. Ideally, it can help you get a lot of specific information about the setup of your applications. And then from there, that's a lot about how your app internally works. Quickbase also has a functionality called pipelines. It is the ability to integrate with other systems and also automate tasks. The easiest way to think about this is every time I add a new customer, I know I have to do certain admin tasks to, like, put them in my system, call them and figure out who their bill what their billing information is. You could say you could build an automation through pipelines that every time you add a new customer, these tasks are added to that tasks table and automatically assigned to people. Super helpful. Takes away my manual work. Makes it really easy to say these processes should just happen on their own without waiting for me or somebody else to do them, but they can be tricky when you don't know that they're there. Because sometimes that leaves your users wondering where does this come from. So, when we send your app, under the app settings, there's an option under advanced features called connection central. What that does is it shows you all of the automations and integrations connected to your single application. If you're an account admin, you might there's also a connection central that does at the higher level, does your whole account. This one is specific for this app. And what this will give you is basically when, like, what what pipe what pipelines exist and what are their names? When were they last run? Did they have any errors? What was their error activity like in the last thirty days? And really, really important to check out is there's a section called channels. What that means with pipelines is it's what you're connecting to. The most common one you'll see will be Quickbase, and that's how you run those automations because you're connecting Quickbase app or somewhere in Quickbase to another place in Quickbase. Depending on what plan you have, you have access to things like Outlook, ServiceNow, Salesforce. There's a we have about 40 plus different integrations available. Knowing what integrations you're using can be really helpful because you if you're pulling data over, that gives you an opportunity to ask what's coming over from where and how important is it. Typically, if you're pulling stuff from another system, you're using it in your reporting, and you wanna make sure that stays live. You'll also be able to find on this another service we offer called sync. This is a slightly older feature that let you let you just pull data from outside sources. Similarly, when you look at that table, it will give you an information of what sync tables you're using. If you're unfamiliar with either of these topics, that's a great opportunity to say, oh, good. My app doesn't have any of these. Like, I can I can wait to figure out what these things are? Or if you find that there is there are pipelines or connections in here in an app you inherited, that might be a sign that it's time to start thinking about reading up on them, learning a little bit more, maybe taking a pipelines one zero one course, that we have in our on demand for on our events page to get familiar with what they do. And that kind of leads us to continuing your education. So you've gotten your app, you found a lot of information about it, what can you do to continue to go drag your skills? We offer a fundamentals course. This is both on demand and a shorter on demand version and a longer live version where we cover a ton of topics. App planning, app creation, it will take that it's that quick starter course pumped way up with way more information. Similarly, if you're looking for some live trainings that you really wanna go next level, we offer a couple different ones that go into specific features, formulas, importing and exporting, building analytics, creating forms. These kind of help you take your skills to that next level. So now we've gone through the first sixty days. Now we're in the grid and creative period. This is when you wanna start thinking about aligning on an ideal state. You know what apps are there. You know which ones are working. You started to fix anything that's immediately broken. Now you wanna be like, I know there's some place more this could go. You start to decide how you wanna approach those changes or updating the applications. And if needed, like, if you've realized you have pipelines and have no idea how they work, you can start learning these more advanced functionalities. So simple place to start. What changes would make your users happy? Always great to add that to your list. What manual tasks could be automated? That's gonna give you and your users a lot more time back in their day. And then lastly, what would make help make everyone's job easier? Happy happy end users, less manual tasks, job easier job. Kind of gonna be a one across the board. One of the ways that you can start to figure out some of that is actually by taking feedback. Again, it's a little, funny to use Quickbase to help you manage Quickbase, but we actually have a feedback app on our Exchange that you can grab today that you can use to track feedback requests from your users so that they can kind of log their, their tips essentially or their, like, requests. And you can use that to help you figure out if there's easy wins you have available for you. This can be really helpful if you're an admin for a whole account because you might not have time to assess everything proactively. You may just not have time in your day yet to say I'm gonna go through every app. You might just need to use this as a way to be like, if there's a problem, someone should raise their hand. And then you can start to sit down and make a plan that says, I've these five apps, these are the two I need to change now to fit very specific reasons. This third one is really important to the business. I need to spend time being creative. I need to make it integrate with the system that we've never integrated with before. I need to build a new workflow for a specific team, and that's gonna help you figure out where you need to spend your time and energy. And another important thing can be where are there more recent features I'm not using right now? Depending on how old the app is, and you start to look at it, you might realize that it's using features that are older, that you're not familiar with. There are some opportunities to upgrade. So I mentioned pipelines already, which is all about integrating and automating your processes to take away manual errors and time that you're wasting just copying and pasting data pan by hand. No one needs to waste their time on that. Systems can do that for you. There's your dashboards we talked about earlier, which collect the most important reports and insights for your users into the first page they land on. Making sure you're using our newest dashboards can be really helpful because they're a lot nicer and a lot easier and have a lot more options. Quickbase AI is is a great tool for if you are in that newer to Quickbase bucket and you need a little help. We have our AI tools that will help you with, building apps, building pipelines for the very to get started, building reports, and also, soon we'll be having one that will help you with, like, help dot questions in general. You can find all of those when you're signed into a Quickbase app. At the very top, there's a little search bar and all of the other icons. One of them is a little sparkle, like a little star sparkle. That will help you access our quick base, AI tools. So we've kinda talked a little bit about how you can start breaking this all apart. Great question that we have for everybody is if you were to build your app from scratch, the ones that you started to learn information on, would you build them the way that they are built today, or are you thinking you might have wanted to start from the beginning? And if you say I would like to start over, you're not alone. I've inherited apps before where I have also been like, gosh. It would have been easier if I could just do it from scratch. And I will say, importantly, depending on how developed the app is, starting from scratch can be potentially easier for you. That's where something like the, smart builder in with AI can be really helpful. You can use AI and describe the app that you need and kinda get a starter point or checking out our Quickbase exchange, which is available just under the, like, full menu bar at the top left of when you're when you're assigned in to Quickbase. You can get template apps that are prebuilt for the purpose. They can help you get started if you realize the app you have maybe just never got built correctly and you'd wanna start from a different place. Yeah. And, definitely, Laura, I understand your your comment about, some of your older apps that would be easier to start from scratch. Sometimes when you get really comfortable in the older features, older forms, older reports, it can be helpful just to sort of be like, it would have been nice to be able to start start fresh and not have to rebuild everything myself. Alright. So let's jump in. So you've you're you have your ideal state. You have kind of where you wanna be. You have your current state. You could similarly to the diagrams we talked about building to help you get used to what's in your app, you can start building a diagram of what's missing. And using those two, you can figure out where you need to start working. You can ask yourself, is there what parts miss the mark? What stuff is super important? What can be really helpful is this ideal state. Go for what you know you want, but then feel comfortable saying what you can actually get done. Very few of us have the luxury of being only devoted to building quick based apps or managing quick based apps. Many of us do it as a part of our job. So be really mindful of scope creep as well. But it can be helpful to think about it in stages and say, well, in order to do any of this other stuff, I have to start here. And that's something you can actually put on your diagram as well. You can start breaking down, like, pieces of what you're going to do to in phases. And then as you start doing that, it's decision time. You know? You need to think, my current app, I have all the data I need. I have the users I'm familiar with. I know all the things I wanna do. My new app could get a fresh start, could refine my focus, make my apps more user friendly. Whether it's making changes to your apps or starting with a brand new app, the question just becomes it becomes down to just making the decision, which is going to work the best for you and for your process today, and how can you start breaking it into chunks that are accessible. And then if you are afraid of editing your app, perhaps you inherited it and you are really nervous about starting to make changes, there are some options that could help you feel a little bit more confident. Copying the app is potentially really helpful if you're just wanting to test out new features or make changes. Within the app settings under that manage app at the very bottom, there's an option to copy an app. Click that, and you actually can make a copy with either with all of the data in the app or just absent all the data. So you can leave all your data in your first app and just have the structure. You can use sandbox if you're on our business or higher, plans, which basically does the same does something very similar. It pulls out a example of the structure of your app, and you can test a few changes before you make them live. We also have something called solutions. It is a feature that lets you basically take a snapshot of the way your app is built right now. And if you make a few changes, you could always go back to your snapshot if you mess something up. It's just for the structure of the app, though, so it's great for when you're adding things. Doesn't do data. So you wanna make sure that you don't go deleting a bunch of stuff and then think you can write back using versions or solutions. And then lastly, if you're feeling really nervous, our solutions team our services team do exist. There are folks here that you can come chat with that could help you figure out, like, I wanna do this project. Can I what would it take to get Quickbase's help? How many hours would I be looking into invest in? Maybe small, maybe big. But they're there to help. And if you're thinking of, like, want some of those more, advanced skills, some of those things might be it's time to get my introduction to pipelines. It's time to think about things like forms, really dynamic forms, how do I load other things like that? Those are available. And then lastly, staying current. This is your stay informed, maintain your processes, continue to build your apps up, and sharpen your skills. And in here, a lot of this is just about, like, the culture of improvement that you have. Some of this can even just be setting goals internally for your team, or for yourself. So we recommend that we have our monthly releases that are you can find at quickbase.com/help with under release notes. Every month, we say what's new and available. It's really helpful to subscribe to those release notes because they will give you information on what we're changing, whether it be adding new features, enhancements, opportunities. You can attend our feature focused webinars. They're a series that we run really regularly. We're about to kick off our big launch for the spring at Empower twenty five, in two weeks, in New Orleans live, but we'll also be doing a livestream of that keynote where our product team is gonna be pulling back the curtains and sharing a ton of stuff on the road map for Quickbase. And then also participating in our community, which is, available for folks to just chat and connect with others and includes our customer networks, which is where we bring like minded customers together. You can determine a regular cadence for looking at your apps. Even for apps that you've gotten to the state that you want them to be at, it's great to set yourself a reminder that, like, once a month, every two months, I should look at those apps and just ask myself, like, is there anything important? You can use the feedback app to create that loop where you get user feedback and you actually let them know when things go live. You can document what you've learned, and then you can start keep optimizing your apps, building new apps, training someone else to help. If you are a new admin on a whole account and you are totally alone, I highly recommend finding yourself one or two other people that should be an account admin and learning together because those folks will be there when you go on vacations, when you wanna be away from work, when you're sick, and you don't wanna have to be the person who needs to log on to fix things because you're the only person with the keys. Same thing if you're an app admin. If you're the only person in there with the administrator role, there might be opportunities to pull some of those folks you're having chat with who have ideas about how to make the app better into the process with you. And then so now what? We have that they have that checklist for owning your app. Like I said, it's available in the document section in the upper right hand corner, or if you've missed it, it's also on our university if you look up the, from app inheritance to ownership workbook. We also then recommend you just just start taking advantage of the resources that make sense for you, whether it be attending a university, getting certified, joining us in some of our future webinars, training other people in your team, just starting to collect feedback. Any of these things are gonna really help you start to enhance the way you're managing click base. And so this is where I like to pause. Thank you all for joining us. I hope this was helpful as a starter point. Obviously, like, this is just getting started with unlocking, like, how you can get more at a quick base and start. You can start making taking yourself from getting an app and asking myself what am I doing to feeling really confident that you're on the ball. So I'm happy to take questions if anybody has any, as we go into the end of our presentation for today. And I'm gonna jump into the QA and start asking what's there, but then if anybody has any other stuff, please let me know. Without Realm admin concept, console access, we have limited visibility to user activity. You can see when they're added in the last visited app, but there's any additional visit Quby can provide. It would be incredibly valuable to have access to see the frequency of app usage at the user level so that we can tell. So I'll stay, Dan. You'd I what you can actually find, if you go into your app settings and you go into that app management section I mentioned, there was a recent addition which is gonna be really great for you. And that is at the very bottom under manage your app, there's an option called show audit logs. This is a recent development where we are going to make some of the audit logs, which are those logs a little bit more about user changing, user access, users changing things, users making edits, you will be able to see them for a specific app. So even though you're not an account admin at the top level, you can sort of see that snapshot for your application. It is, is very new. We will be talking about it more in two weeks at Empower. You'll be able to see some demos, and there'll be some sessions where they actually talk about it. But that can be a really helpful tool for figuring out what's going on in your app right now and getting more into your users' accessibility and visibility even if you don't have that Realm admin console access level. Also, if you if your account has those console levels up, you can chat with folks about getting minimum access so they could customize and give you access to some of the data perhaps without giving it to you to all giving access to all of it. I'll say someone I have some tables that are populated by the BI team. They basically insert our our data with external information on a daily, hourly basis. This is the way to identify which fields cannot be modified because they are being auto populated. Depends, Takeshi, on how they're doing it. If they're using pipelines, if you go into a field and check its usage, it will tell you if it's included in a pipeline or not. If they are using a custom coding, like, if they're using a p an API to pull information outside of Quickbase from service from systems without using our built in integrations, that's a little tougher. You typically there have to just chat with them and get an idea of which ones are are being pulled over or not. I would say I would recommend starting with field usage. So if there's some fields you care deeply about, going into them, checking the usage, you can actually see if they're using any pipelines or other quick base, integrations systems. Connection Central can help with that as well. You can check and see at the in the Connection Central for your app if you have any currently acts currently being used pipelines. Alright. So I see Kim, you asked, I have just created my first app with a lot of help from community and Discord, but there are a lot of fields pulled from relationships I added that are not needed. How do I get through and delete these fields and clean up relationships without breaking things? Great question. I've helped people with this a lot when I was on the technical support team. What I highly recommend is you can in your application for every table, you can go into their table to table relationships, and you can see what fields are in each relationship. So I can actually show you a quick example if you give me just a second to share my screen. So you should be able to see now I'm in one of my own test apps, and I'm in my table to table relationships. And let's say I know I have this company is in contacts relationship. This will tell me which ones are part of the relationship. In particular, these are lookup fields. These are the fields you're pulling from the parent down to the child, and these are summary fields where you're pulling information from the child up to the parent. You can check here to get the names of things. And if you need to, you might realize you have a really common thing if someone built a relationship multiple times. They might have related company one, related company two, related company three. You can figure out which one is the one actively used in the relationship you still have, and then you can start going through your list of fields and deleting the ones that aren't. If you're worried about fields that used to be part of relationships but aren't anymore, what can be really helpful is going into the settings for your table as well, grabbing your field settings, and you can see which ones are part of an active relationship right now and what relationship it is. So even if you have a field called, like, related contact or add activity or number of documents, if it's not in a relationship, that means it's just a static field. And so that might help you find the things that you wanna remove. Similarly to, the question earlier, you can also go into a field. And under usage, you can get some information on what reports and forms it's used in and also get this little table down here that tells you all kinds of information. I'm like, is it on forms? Is it is it in fields? Is it on my dashboards? And you can even see how much data is in there. If a field that you're unsure about has no data and no records in it, it's probably a good field to get rid of. Alright. Let me stop that and keep moving. What is the best way to address an application that was built in an older version of QB and part of it is, with updates? So that's a great question. It's really not an uncommon one for an older quick based apps. You might be thinking you have old dashboards, you have old forms. Some of that is manual work. One of the things you can do is if it's a matter of old dashboards, you can look at all the roles you have and what dashboards they're using. And if they all share a dash board or if they share an old home page, for example, that could be an easy place to start updating things. And you could just side by side the old, table that you have in a new dashboard and start basically one to one recreate and reassign your role, and everyone's suddenly gonna have a nicer app. Similarly with forms, you can go into a specific table, and there's a forms section, very like when we were looking at fields, where you can see all the forms you have and you can figure out which ones are used by which roles. If you only have a few forms or a small number of roles, it can be really easy to just say, I now is the time to kinda, like, peel the Band Aid off and replace it with a new form. Some of that work is manual. The because the new features offer things in a different way and offer due new functionality that you didn't have before, there's some, there's some changes you just kinda have to ride with. We changed the way we did form rules to give us a lot more power out of our forms. We changed a lot of visual elements to simplify things. I would say, like, the best thing to start with is that's a great opportunity to talk to end users and be like, what stuff, is like, what stuff works and what stuff is broken? Usually, like I said, they'll let you know if they don't like a process, and you can kinda be ah, okay. That is helpful. And so that is, that's, like, a great place to start. It's they it can be tricky if you've got an old app that's really big, but it can be really worth it to pick a few small places to start. Also helpful, that's when it's a great opportunity to ask yourself if there's other people who could be involved in the admin process. Maybe there's someone else on another team who also wants to see an update that you could partner with, and you could help them become an admin, and they could start helping you build new forms and reports, because they will make a big difference in your user experience. Alright. Got to the end of the questions that I had in here. So if anyone has anything else they'd love to ask, I've got a few more minutes. Otherwise, we can wrap up there. I can give thank you all for joining us. I really appreciate taking the time. Like I mentioned before, if you are wanting more, there's still time to sign up for our Empower twenty five keynote livestream that will be happening of the, April or March 31 and April 1. They'll be they're casting it live from, from New Orleans, but you'll be able to see our, our c our CEO and a bunch of our product team take the stage and talk about what's coming for Quickbase throughout the rest of the year. You can also find, mixed to that as well as our inherited app workbook, our Quickbase courses, and things like that in the docs in the right upper right hand corner, which will be full of resources for you to help out with getting more used to quick based, getting more comfortable. And when in doubt, if you're a specific topic you're interested in, you can always check and see quickbased.com/events. We have a bunch of on demand content from older webinars that cover a ton of topics, and we have a whole series that will be coming in the, next couple of months focused on that new release and a bunch of new functionality. Thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate y'all taking time out of your day to learn a little bit more about Quickbase, and definitely let us know if there's any anything we can help with. Alright, buddy. Have a great rest of your day.