In the global economy, it is important for a remote project team to have an easy way to organize, track and share their information.

As a team collaborative strategist and a techie, I love tools that can get a globally-located project team performing and producing in minutes. Intuit’s QuickBase is one of those tools. It is a web application that requires no installation, no setup, and no upgrades. A team can develop a customized application in minutes.

Used QuickBase on a remote collaborative project in 2003. Thought it was a good tool. Recently got a chance to use it again. As an user of it, I have nothing but positive raves about it. We used it for information sharing, workflow and business co-operation. In today’s business world, a company that has a well-organized team, will have has an immense competitive advantage.

Organizing Information: With a single web site as the centerpoint, team members can instantly find the information that they need and update it.

Tracks information: The team can always find what are the current status of a certain milestone, a certain project document and a “hot” tactical activity.
Shares information: Team members have easy access to your QuickBase applications through their web browser. They can control what information each individual can see and whether they can modify, share, or simply view it.

Immediate Update: QuickBase keeps things moving along. Automated e-mails notify team members when a file has been updated, when a new task has been assigned to them, when a deadline is approaching, and more.

Other positives of QuickBase are: automatc updates, “above average” secured protocol and nightly backup.

QuickBase costs $249 per month-including storage for 5MB of data and 100MB of file attachments-for up to ten users. Additional users cost $3 each per month; volume pricing is available for groups of 100 or more. Extra data storage is available as well.

We looked at other similar web applications. The operating prices were cheap and possessed similar collaborative features. None of them was as flexible as QuickBase.

One of the positives that I like about QuickBase is that teams is able to customize it’s applications to their specificiations.

Please check out QuickBase. It’s free for 30 days. You don’t need a credit card to give it a test drive. Try building an application; there is a strong possibility that you might get hooked
Summary
With QuickBase, your project team will have an easy way to organize, track and share information - all from a single web site.

The price is slightly steep if you are running a team of two or three. As a team collaboration took, QuickBase is a great tool.

From my understanding, nearly 50% of the Fortune 100 uses QuickBase. If your company intents to compete against them, you should consider using QuickBase as the principal collaborative tool for your team.

In a future article, will elaborate on more of our experience with QuickBase.

Sincerely Yours

Global360ChiefArchitect

Tools come. Tools go. The Defacto tool stays the same

Since the 80’s, I used many word processors and text editors as programming editors. Used Wordstar to PC Write before settling on Brief as my #1 programming editor. Upgraded it for Notepad, Vi and EMacs. In early 2000’s, was referred to UltraEdit by an Oracle programmer. Downloaded it. Bought it. Never stopped using it. Wrote various programming code (i.e, HTML, C++ , perl etc.). Never had any problems. Because of my limited needs, never felt I have to upgrade it.

UltraEdit is ideal for editing HEX, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, ASP, C/C++, Java, and VBScript and is configurable for almost any language! The developer of UltraEdit developed wordfiles for syntax highlighting for hundreds of languages. Talked to many people who use UltraEdit for a wide range of programming activities. Their response is that the versatility, power, and performance of UltraEdit is unmatched!

Learned that it has recently been upgraded to UltraEdit 13. Got a copy, played with it and loves it. Noticed that 75 more features have been added to this new version of UltraEdit.

Some of my favorites are:
* Integrated Scripting;
* Preview HTML in Browser;
* Spell Check While Typing; and
* Customizable Find-in-Files Output.

Was performing a code review awhile back. Took me about 30 seconds to create the regular expression in UltraEdit. Then generated a detailed report in less than 6 minutes. Spend the next 12 minutes with reg-exp search-and-replace to strip out all of the lines that were in comments. If there was such thing as the consummate tool, UltraEdit is it.

Currently you can get the UltraEdit at here for $.49.95

If you are a serious code cutter, recommend the purchase of UEStudio. This package is a powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) built on the framework of UltraEdit. It includes all the features of UltraEdit plus native support for over 30 popular compilers (including Microsoft Visual C++, Java, GNU C/C++, PHP, Perl and over 30 others), an Integrated Debugger, Integrated VCS Version Control, built-in Class Browsing, Language Intelligence (like Intellisense), Project Converter, and a Batch Builder to name just a few of its advanced features. It is fast, lightweight, and powerful and offers any UltraEdit user the advanced programming functionality that he would needs. You can get it for here at a fantastic value of $99.95.

In future article, we will touch on other great IDM tools- Ultra-Compare and Ultra-Sentry.

Sincerely Yours

Global360ChiefArchitect