HCL Notes vs. Quickbase

I often work with teams from other country and regions, hence HCL Notes is a very useful platform for internal company management operations. It standardized organisational work standards in most of the offices worldwide. HCL Notes also enables chat with other team around the world that I find very helpful when initiating conversation or just want to have a quick update rather than sending emails and waiting for replies. However, HCL Notes is not very efficient in web browsing and user still need to use other internet service providers.

Incentivized

Quickbase has proven that if it's in a spreadsheet, it really should be in Quickbase. One of my more recent achievements with the program was redesigning our current process for notifying management of something irregular. The old process had all the notification infrastructure built behind the scenes with only a handful of people knowing and understanding the process. The new process was able to clean up the behind-the-scenes and also provide an increased level of intuitiveness by allowing complete visibility and customization of notification recipients. This allows the initial notification to reach a select number of management individuals who can then decide whether or not it needs to be escalated, all while allowing the operations personnel to get back to work immediately. The biggest issue I've found with the program is the limitation of the user - I find that the biggest roadblock in my way is myself, as I am confident the program has the ability to accomplish what I need, but am I skilled enough to create it? This has helped me become very proficient in only one year of use and become more active in community engagement surrounding the program.

Incentivized

• Data sharing via small database format is valuable as they are quickly deployed, easily managed and distributed on backend email servers.
• Integrated messaging allows quick communications between geographical sites reducing long distance costs.
• Policy documents for registering new users, setting initial security levels, assigning default database access is managed easily with the admin client.

Incentivized

• Rapidly bring new ideas to life
• Great authentication and authorization system out of the box
• Connects with many major third-party services (via Pipelines)
• Reporting and Dashboards are awesome
• Excellent emails notification system to keep us in the loop when data changes
• Intuitive UI for building forms and reports
• Nice playground to test new ideas

Incentivized

• The simple user experience can be touted as a positive, but it is also a negative in some ways. Compared to other calendars, email and chat tools, IBM Notes looks like it is from the 90s.
• We have constant issues with chat crashing. This is the main reason so many people in our organization chose to switch away from Notes.
• There aren't a lot of integrations with IBM Notes and other applications we regularly use. Notes seems to have been left behind by many.

Incentivized

• Pipelines - being able to share them or have permissions based viewing capabilities
• Table size limits are small for really large apps. While I agree that there needs to be a cap on the size, it would be nice to adjust it up when needed.

Since companies started to moved their email systems to the Exchange platform and the cloud, we are unable to find any new projects with IBM Notes, the marketing share and software price is another issue, so we have to move to another platform.

We are growing our user base and getting more out of this system. Quick Base will continue to grow with our company as more of our users become super users and are capable of developing new features and solutions. We're getting more and more interested from departments that are hearing of our successes.

Incentivized

Easy to use for the user, most of the apps we developed, there is not much need for user training. Most of the times, we just do a demo to the users group and they can pick up from there.

Quick Base has done everything we have asked it to do and then some. Our original goal was to have one system for CRM that encompassed both the sales process and the customer management. We have gone w-a-y beyond that with analytics, project management, system bug logging, and historical effort reporting.

Incentivized

I gave it a 10, but it should be a 9.99. They do a nice job of keeping the application running. The application can drag a bit when you have thousands of users accessing the application concurrently. We experienced this with large scale implementations.

Some of our tables that hold over a million records are starting to perform poorly, with some summaries taking over 20 seconds to load. This may be an indication that it is best to archive old data when reaching large volumes like this.

Incentivized

I've been using the production for a very long time and very happy with it. Also, all the online resources and forums for notes is very friendly and easy/quick for getting help. I found out that compared to Microsoft or Oracle or any other platforms, IBM Notes online forum is the best I have seen.

If you utilize the community, the support is amazing. Unfortunately, I find their actual support system a bit underwhelming. They don't seem to have a great process for interacting directly with an issue and often sweep significant issues under the rug by categorizing them as "Enhancement" ideas or legacy items.

It is very easy to get training from their University portal and still if we don't know their, then we can ask their support too.

Quick Base already is having a separate portal of providing training to customers and it is very easy to use and updates as per the new features added in to the application

Implementation is easy and smooth if the requirement is well gathered/documented. Notes is a RAD platform, all projects in Notes is simple in the implementation step.

I was not directly involved with the initial account implementation, only a bystander. For the app I directly implemented for my department only, I wish I had know to create an app diagram first. I don't remember if that was suggested. I think that would be a great help tip tool when a new app is created, to have a page with a check list of what is needed or how to get started. If you are a regular app builder, then you can bypass it or have the ability to turn it off in the app settings.

I've already answered this question in the previous questions however to sum it up IBM Notes stacks up VERY WELL! It has a LOT of really good business/enterprise features like enterprise-grade Dropbox-like storage, synced email/calendar/contacts, it supports a LOT of third-party add-ins, easy-to-use and friendly, very strong and robust, and most importantly it's a LOT more secure in my opinion than the competition.

Incentivized

I picked Quickbase before investigating the low-code no-code market because I was so impressed. I did a pricing exercise a couple years ago because Quickbase was drastically increasing the cost and decreasing our allotments/features. We could have saved a lot of money by going with another comparable solution. However, those companies didn't have the longevity and all of the features and functions that Quickbase had.

Incentivized

While the purpose of this product is to provide flexibility and scalability to and organization, it is not as easy to roll out on the enterprise level. The support from Quick Base is not on a level that it makes the process easy and fluid. Be prepared to spend more time on this product than you might want to.

Incentivized

• ROI for us has been extreme. In the late 1990's we automated dozens and dozens of paper-based processes and created workflows for activities that had never been formalized before. Additionally all those forms with their comments, etc. have been captured in a central place to serve as audit trails.
• Whenever we need faster access to data (mail or otherwise), it's quick and easy to deploy a new Domino server somewhere, setup replication of appropriate databases, and get the local Notes clients pointed to those resources. So that to me is positive ROI because it represents time savings based on user need.
• Tech. Support would claim a negative ROI in terms of supporting the Notes client, Notes updates, peculiar Notes issues, and users who complain about Notes. That is certainly true to a point. The Notes client is a much more complex piece of software than, say, Outlook. But we have to remember that Notes deployments are not just for Mail but many, many applications as well. In the end I'd say we might have 1 or 2 user complaints per month, typically around Calendar issues more than anything else.

• Quickbase has saved us so much time by reducing the clicks you need to get from one place to another. It takes the average colleague 5 or 6 clicks to get to another tool they need to do their job whereas it takes me 1 or 2 clicks to get to that same tool by using a personal Quickbase dashboard that has all the tools I need all on one page. This is a huge timesaver, especially when desk sharing where you have to get quickly to the info you want to share.
• Quickbase has helped us streamline workflows and close gaps by having to ask for info only 1 time. Since users can't save a form until they've provided all the info you need on your end to complete a task, it saves a tremendous amount of time for everyone. No more replying to emails 2 or 3 times until you get the info you need.

Incentivized