Quintified

In addition to some behind-the-scenes programming development and improvement of our internal systems, here are some exciting new features that we at Quintify have rolled out recently into all of our core products:

Global search now looks inside of uploaded PDF files and Microsoft Office documents and includes their contents in search results.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned global search in this blog, but this cool feature allows you to search across all of the “things” in your system in one search box and one set of search results ordered by relevancy. This way you can search client records, notes, orders, products, jots, projects, tasks, and so on from a single search box. (Compared to our “filters” search capability that allows you to drill down with precision, this global search capability allows you to cast a wide net. Both complement each other very well.)

Now, these search results include the contents of the PDF files and MS Office documents you’ve uploaded into your system. I played around with this by creating a one-sentence MS Word document that said “how now brown cow”. Then I uploaded that into our database system and did a global search for “brown cow” and my Word document showed up in the search results. Nice!

Improved lead/client import via a spreadsheet upload

In the past our system was “picky” about the spreadsheets that could be uploaded into them to import data — in particular the columns in the spreadsheet had to be in a certain order, and if you weren’t including information for one of the fields in the database you had to include that column but leave it blank. And you could only include information for a particular set of fields/columns. (Sorry about that!)

Now, the lead/client upload page does not require your spreadsheet’s columns to be in any particular order, and you can also add addition columns  of information that can be added in as client notes.

“Quick jump” links on the “List Clients” and “List Documents” pages that allow you to quickly pull up the status or category that you want.

A client with many different kinds of many documents in their system asked for a quick way to filter to a particular category of documents, e.g. “forms” or “blank contracts”. We had wanted similar functionality for our own system and went ahead and included it in all of our core products as well.

This is particularly helpful on the “List Clients” page, because with it you can immediately jump to your list of “Suspects”, “Prospects”, “Shoppers”, “Customers”, etc. — or whatever set of client statuses you have set up in your system.

Enjoy!

As a computer programmer, I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow — both the website and the podcast, and I was thrilled when Stack Exchange came out so that anyone can have their own Stack-Overflow-like website on their topic of choice. Today I took the time to set up Quintify’s Stack Exchange website.

Quintify::Answers — found at http://answers.quintify.com — provides a forum for Quintify customers and prospects to ask and answer questions about using their Quintify databases. We anticipate a Quintify user community growing around this over time, and Quintify team members will monitor it to provide regular how-to info for those asking questions.

Right now there is only one question on the site — asked and answered by me — but eventually the site will be a large knowledge base easily accessible by all Quintify database users.

Quintify has an outdoor (sand) volleyball team that plays Friday nights at Capt’n Bill’s — it’s a lot of fun. This was our first season, although the core of our team played on Queensboro’s team for many years. The team is composed of former Queensboro teammates, clients, friends, spouses, and myself — with several players falling into several of these categories.

Last night we ended the regular season beating Queensboro, putting us at 12-2 and in first place for the season. We’ll get a trophy for this, and will hopefully win another trophy at our end-of-season tournament in two weeks.

Outdoor volleyball is so much fun that one of my hopes for my kids is that they’ll be playing this sport competitively when they are my age. As much as they hang out at Capt’n Bill’s with us, they should be pretty good by then!

On Thursday (11/12) UNCW will be hosting the Wilmington Area Professionals IT Breakfast in the Madeleine Suite from 7:30 AM - 9:15 AM. The topic will be the “Impact/Future of Cloud Computing.”

I’m going to be one of the speakers, and will spend the majority of my time discussing things we and others are doing with Amazon’s Web Services for cloud computing. This is a fascinating topic for me and I’m particularly excited about Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).

The vast majority of the paying work we do these days involves building, maintaining, and extending very highly customized systems for “small” multi-million dollar companies. Our code generator spits out “single tenant” systems — each client gets their own programming code base. This enables us to customize anything however the client wants to the extreme, since their system has its own programming code, but it makes it a bit of a pain to “back in” new features that we come up into preexisting systems. (Just a bit though.)

In addition to building these types of very highly customized systems for relatively larger companies, my dream and passion has been to provide the power, functionality, and flexibility of the database systems we offer our larger clients to small businesses everywhere. However, to be able to scale well in offering standardized products, our single-tenant model wasn’t ideal — if you have 10,000 customers using your product, you definitely don’t want to have to manage 10,000 copies of identical code, one for each one!

Tonight brought the “aha” that enabled me to enable multi-tenant in our products, and I tied that in to a “free trial signup” form so that people will be able to sign up and get their free trial without us having to do anything. With this automation we can offer our databases to even the smallest of companies at an very affordable price, and soon we’ll be doing just that. And then, for any company using one of our products that wants substantial customization, we’ll be able to do anything they want with their system by “popping it out” to single-tenant status. (Imagine the response you’d get asking Microsoft to customize one of their products just for you! This customization is our bread-and-butter.)

I’m excited!

I’ve stayed up late tonight reading “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wockman. It’s awesome, and I’m very excited about implementing it in Quintify.

For a while now I’ve wanted us to build in a “business development” module into our Quintify business database software to go along with the CRM, project/task management, order fulfillment, invoicing/AR, marketing, CMS, etc. that we already include. I’m going to build Traction’s model into our own database system, and if it goes as well as I think it will, I’m going to talk to Gino’s company about us having a Traction-branded version of Quintify::Complete. (One nice thing about our code generator is that such stuff can get implemented pretty quickly. I’d also like to create an ActionCOACH-branded version using their business development model.)

I’ve heard the things in Traction before — from Michael Gerber, Reggie Shropshire, and others. But Traction really explains things in an easy-to-understand-and-implement way. Or perhaps I’ve been exposed to the concepts enough that they are finally taking root.

(I’m speaking at an undergraduate database class today at UNCW and needed a place to stick some supplemental notes, and thought I’d put them here.)

Some best practices in data modeling for web application development, particularly for “backend” business systems:

1. Initially focus on database tables, fields and relationships and not what the web pages are going to look like. If the data model is right, the user interface will (pretty much) take care of itself.

2. For all major “things” in your system, have a table for notes: product_note, client_note, quote_note, task_note, etc. (And encourage users to add notes.)

3. For each database table, have the following fields:

• date added
• date last modified
• last modified by

4. At the application level, have edit locks to prevent two users from trying to edit the same record at the same time, with the one submitting the form last overwriting the one who submitted it first. (At the data model level, in addition to the three recommend fields above, also have “date last locked” and “last locked by”.)

5. Think through (and discuss with your client) one-to-many vs. many-to-many relationships. For example, when setting up a database for a school, does each class have one and only one teacher or can a class have multiple teachers? When discussing this with a client, ask them if the relationship in question needs a select list (one-to-many) or checkboxes (many-to-many) in the web form. In our example, some schools will be one-to-many but others will be many-to-many. Getting this right from the start will save headaches down the road.

6. Log user access — both system access (logins) and page access (page views and actions). You probably won’t often need to know who accessed what page when and from where, but when you do, having that info in the database is golden.

7. Be careful about losing historical information. For example, if you have a product table that contains “unit_cost”, you might be tempted to not include “unit_cost” in your order_line database table, since that info is already available in the product table and “don’t duplicate info” is a value. However, over time the products’ costs are likely to change, and at that point you won’t know what the cost was for a product ordered last year unless you captured that info in the order_line database table. The solution is to have the “unit_cost” in the order_line table.

8. When setting up the data model for user access, seriously consider having users and usergroups be “many to many”, so that user access to particular parts of the system is “nonlinear”. I’ve seen others’ systems where each user could be given basic access, or intermediate access, or admin access, and I’ve heard about a system where one’s access rights were a scale from 1 to 100, with someone at a 70 getting everything below that, and someone at an 80 getting everything below that. It’s much better to have multiple usergroups (e.g. customer service, accounting, marketing, etc.) and then allow users to be in multiple usergroups based on their roles within the organization, which each usergroup having its own set of access permissions.

9. I name all of my “join table” tables with a “j” at the front, e.g. jstudent_class and jemployee_usergroup. This is really helpful for quickly knowing what relationship type the table encompasses.

10. Sometimes calculated fields are OK. For some reason at one point in my life I was under the impression that calculated fields in database tables were evil, but there are times when they are very helpful, particularly depending upon the framework you are using. With wm, we can set a flag for a field being a calculation, so that it doesn’t show up in the add/edit form, but it does show up in the display and the search filters. The only catch is that we need to add the code for the calculation, but we have things in place to handle that.

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Any comments, or any more you’d like to add?

Quintify currently has a job posting for a marketing intern. I think this is an awesome opportunity — if my kids were a bit older I’d encourage them to pursue it. (I wish I had the time to pursue it myself!)

The first two resumes / cover letters we got reminded me of what I often see with such things — the cover letters and resumes are form letters, and mention nothing about the specific opportunity we’re offering, or in this case about Port City Deals (a major subject of our job posting.)

Wouldn’t it be so easy for them to say, “I checked out Port City Deals and love it! I can picture a site like this in every metropolitan area across the country, and I’m excited about having a role in bringing that about! While I haven’t done much with marketing a real product at this (young) point in my life, I’m eager to learn as I go and jump in with both feet.” (Better yet to suggest some first steps toward marketing the business opportunity.)

But instead: Here I am. Here’s my background. I can help you, and I’ll benefit too. I’m going to call you next week to make sure you got my stuff.

But did you read my stuff?!?!?!

Agghhh!!

Information release from Kim LeClair of CFCC’s Small Business Center (Wilmington, NC):

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Database Development for Your Small Business

September 10th from 6-8 p.m. / Room L-107

FREE SEMINAR

I am pleased to announce this NEW seminar that will help many businesses run more efficiently. Below is a course outline of what will be covered. Mr. Reid Wilson, from Quintify Database Solutions, will be presenting this seminar.

Course Outline: Are you currently storing all your clients in an Excel spreadsheet? Are you sticking with a legacy system that no longer meets your needs? Many small businesses are using outdated means to store their contacts, do process management, and provide actionable reporting. As part of this seminar, we will show you the 8 key benefits of having a great database:

• Reduce complexity
• All key info is in one place only
• Productivity gains
• You can scale
• Knowledge to make decisions
• Easy customer contact
• Gives the business owner peace of mind
• Immediate ROI plus builds long-term financial value

I am attaching a registration form for those that are interested in attending. If you have any questions, you can reach me directly at 362-7216. Have a wonderful day.

Kim LeClair

SBC, Cape Fear Community College

Port City Deals, a half-price certificate website created by Quintify (with logo and site design by ProVision Media), was featured on WWAY TV’s news last night.

Here is a link to the spot on WWAY’s website.

We are offering these half-price certificate websites as a business opportunity to people in geographic locales across the country, and are excited at Port City Deals’ great start. In addition to the nice public website, we’ve built a full-featured  “backend” admin system that allows a team to manage every aspect of the business.

If you are outside of the WIlmington area and would like to discuss getting such a site for yourself, please contact us.

PCD Deals page:

PCD Deal page:

PCD admin main menu