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!

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.

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Project / task management
• Quotes, orders and invoicing
• Services and products
• Email marketing
• Time management and time clocks
• Client portal
• Robust reporting
• And much more!

Each database product is offered for a low monthly fee of $55 per month.  There is no contract to sign, no long-term commitment, and no hidden fees.  Additionally, there are no limits to the number of users who can access the system or the number of records that can be stored. 

To learn more about the products or to sign up for a FREE 30-day trial, please visit the websites below.

Quintify::Complete - an ideal solution for small and medium sized businesses
 
Quintify::Business Coach - perfect for business coaches who need to keep in touch quickly and easily with their clients
 
Quintify::Virtual Assistant - great for virtual assistants who need to keep track of their tasks, perform invoicing or other administrative tasks
 
Quintify::Web Developer - amazing tool for those who design and develop great websites

If you know someone who might benefit from one of our products, please feel free to link to this blog entry!

PS:  Know someone who is looking to start up a business for a very low cost?  Visit http://www.mytowndeals.biz for more information on an excellent home-based business opportunity for budding entrepreneurs!

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!

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).

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!

With a Quintify database - you can do all of this from one place. Your client records are updated in real time and you can easily add them to specific segments when setting up the client. When you’re ready to send an email blast - you’re working with up-to-date client segments and you don’t have to re-upload your data. Super easy!

Today I recorded a tutorial on the basics of sending an email blast using a Quintify database. People send all types of emails with our databases - from newsletters and announcements to sales and promotional emails. You can click on the tutorial below to get a 7-minute overview of how to send emails to your clients. Creating, testing and scheduling!

In the very near future, I’m going to create a tutorial on how to uitilize our WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor so you can make amazing emails to send out to your clients. For now, here’s the basic overview. Enjoy!

How to Send Emails to Your Clients: http://www.quintify.com/tutorials/emailbasic/emailbasic.html

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.

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?