Quickbase October 2022 Release Notes

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10.16.22

New

Pipelines packaging updates and access to more channels

Starting on October 16th, we will begin the process of rolling out an update to all customers. The update will expand access to Pipelines channels, and will be turned on for customers in stages throughout Q4 2022. The update will expand access to Pipelines channels. After the update, you will no longer have a specific limit to the number of channels that you can turn on in your realm. Instead, you'll have full access to the set of channels associated with your plan tier (see the image below). Review the full list of channels included with each plan tier on the Channels Catalog public webpage.    

Note: You should not experience any interruption in service or negative impact as these changes roll out. We are automatically granting your account access to the channels you are already using, even if they are now outside of your plan tier.  

Pipelines channel management improvements

To support the Pipelines packaging updates, several improvements are being introduced to the Pipelines tab and Permissions tab of the Admin Console. These updates provide increased visibility and control for admins:

Admin Console — Pipelines tab

• You can see all the channels included in your Plan

• By default, all of your channels will be turned on so that your users can have access to them

• Any channels you turned off in July 2022 or later will remain off

• Future channels that Quickbase builds will also be turned on by default

• You can directly turn on / off each included channel: Bucket, CSV Handler, Callable Pipelines, Clock, JSON Handler, Text, and Webhooks

• You can directly turn on / off additional third party integration channels (if applicable for your plan): Amazon S3, Autodesk, Gmail, ODBC, Procore, Snowflake, and more

Admin Console — Permissions tab

The new Specific user, with specific channels option on the Permissions tab of the Admin Console gives customers on our Enterprise plan the ability to control exactly which users have access to each of the enabled channels on an account.

The update to what Pipelines channels are available for you to access introduces some new behavior for active Pipelines and ones you are building.

If you turn off a channel in the Admin Console:

• All active pipelines using this channel in your realm will be suspended (temporarily disabled)

• No users will be able to build new Pipelines with the channel

• When users open a pipeline using the disabled channel, they will see a message that says: This pipeline has a disconnected channel. Please contact your realm admin to reconnect the channel or use a different channel.

If you remove a channel from a specific user/group/domain in the Permissions grid, all active pipelines for the affected users will be suspended. All affected users will not be able to build new Pipelines with the channel.

If you remove the permissions for a user to Pipelines in general, they will lose access to the Pipelines menu and all their active Pipelines will be suspended.

Re-enabling a channel or allowing a user to build Pipelines again will automatically re-activate their suspended pipelines.

Note: It may take up to 5 minutes for changes to go into effect.

Autodesk channel in Pipelines

Autodesk is a leading software provider with multiple product lines, including several products in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC). With the new Autodesk channel in Pipelines, customers can interact with Hubs, Projects, Items, and Folders to integrate and automate workflows primarily related to document-management. This new channel allows customers to integrate areas of Autodesk Construction Cloud and Autodesk BIM 360 with all other channels in Quickbase Pipelines including Salesforce, Twilio, Microsoft Outlook, Procore, and more. Check out the help page for more details, as well as common use-cases.

Realm admin view of Pipelines

Realm admins will now be able to review a complete list of the pipelines that have been built by all users, in one view. This gives admins the visibility into all integrations and automations on their realm, without needing to repetitively select Switch User to view the pipelines of individual users one at a time. The new realm level view of Pipelines will be accessible to realm admins by selecting a toggle on the My Pipelines page. This will bring up a list of Pipelines, with information like the pipeline name, pipeline owner, pipeline on/off status, channels associated to the pipeline, trigger type, and last triggered date/time.

Realm admins can now search by pipeline name, channel, and/or owner email so they can easily find, review, and govern all their realm apps, data, and connections in a unified and simplified manner. To learn more, read the help article.

Enhancements

Pipelines Outlook Channel: Reading from Shared Mailbox

You can now read emails from shared mailboxes in Outlook, allowing you to completely automate a request cycle. This applies to the following steps: New Email, Search Email and Look Up an Email.

For example, you can now read support requests from a shared mailbox and use details from the email header and body to automatically populate records in a Quickbase table. Once the record is created, a Work Order ID is generated and sent back to the original recipient to confirm that their request is being processed.

New report builder panel: Styling update

We’ve updated the appearance of the panel to clarify how you can resize its width. Hover over the left edge of the panel, then click and drag to make the panel as wide as you’d like.

Note: The report builder panel is currently available only on Kanban reports. Over time, we will be expanding this to cover all report and chart types.

New charts: Report caching support

Customers on Enterprise-level plans will be able to improve the performance of charts using a cache (a temporary store of data). We recommend that advanced users use caching with:

• Complex reports where the underlying data may not change often

• Reports that use large datasets

Charts will use the table’s default cache behavior or unless something different has been specified in the report’s settings. Users will be able to refresh report data from the report toolbar in Quickbase.

Users will be able to see if a report has been cached from within the Dashboard widget.

See our help center article on report caching for more information.

Beta opportunities

Retirements

Automations not reaching End of Life in January 2023

The next phase in our Automations retirement journey is the End of Life phase. This is the final phase, when the Automations feature will be completely removed from the product. Pipelines is the future of automation and integration in Quickbase. It supports both orchestrating workflows within Quickbase and integrating workflows across your tech ecosystem, all in one place.

To prepare for the End of Life of Automations, we gathered feedback from many of you on how you plan to continue creating new no-code workflows. This uncovered an opportunity for several key improvements to Pipelines, which will replace Automations. These improvements will make it easier to build and govern pipelines, and help pipelines run faster than ever before. We also heard that you needed more time to accomplish the task of migrating your existing automated workflows over into Pipelines. Based on the feedback we gathered from many of our customers, we believe this extension in the End of Life timeline will successfully allow for you to plan and accomplish your migrations. For more information, please refer to our Community post about the phases and timeline for the Automations retirement project. As a reminder, Quickbase Automations is no longer a supported feature. Therefore, it is no longer possible to create new automations. We recommend that you continue to migrate any remaining automations you have to pipelines. To learn more about migrating to Pipelines, please see this community post. In addition, we've created a brand-new workshop called How to get from A to P which is designed to teach Pipelines to those familiar with using Automations.

We will share more details on the timeline for Automations End of Life in upcoming release notes.

You will have at least six months notice to prepare for the new End of Life date.

Quickbase Sync Zuora Connector is now End of Life

We have retired the Zuora connector for Quickbase Sync. This means it is no longer possible to create a connected table by integrating with Zuora. To set up a workflow that integrates and automates data from Zuora to third party systems and Quickbase apps, please use the Pipelines Zuora channel.

What’s fixed in Quickbase