Public Access
Quickbase is designed to bring together people, data, and processes into one place to drive operational efficiency. One way we do that is through our public access capabilities. This makes it faster and easier to collaborate between internal and external stakeholders.
Our platform offers a range of features to support this, including sharing apps publicly, emailing non-Quickbase users, and sending secure links.
Emailing non-users
Using Quickbase’s built-in email capability, you can send a message to people who are not registered users on your Quickbase account. This is useful for things like updating clients’ support tickets or vendors’ purchase orders without needing to give them access to Quickbase. Therefore, it is not necessary to share a Quickbase app publicly to email non-users. However, it is often useful to combine these two capabilities to acknowledge public submissions.
Sharing apps publicly
Quickbase apps can be shared publicly in a few different ways:
Read-only
Great for communicating with the general public, like to invite people to open-ended events which do not require registration, like a city council meeting or a ribbon-cutting for a new development. In this configuration, anyone can visit the app in Quickbase to view records, but all modify access is disabled.
Write-only
Commonly used to collect non-public data from outside your organization, like surveys, customer support tickets, or bids on a public project. Using this configuration, anyone can visit the Quickbase app, view a dashboard that displays no records but instead gives instructions on the process at hand and offers a button for creating a record, but viewing or editing records is disabled. An email may be sent from Quickbase to acknowledge the submission and give a copy of the record, without linking back to the app in Quickbase.
Read and write
This design combines the advantages of read-only and write-only. This configuration also typically requires using secure links, so more detail is given in the next section.
Secure links
When you share an app publicly, you can use secure links so public submissions can be amended or corrected easily and securely. This enables the Read and Write setup mentioned in the previous section.
A secure link is a URL pointing to a single Quickbase record or a report of multiple records. There is an access key embedded in the link, so no separate password is required. If the link is forwarded to someone else, they would be able to use it too. You can embed these links into your workflows, sending them via email, MS Teams, etc.
You can use our formula engine to build custom logic for the access key, allowing the links to expire after a desired length of time or when the record changes to a certain status like “completed” or “cancelled”.
Role-based access controls
When using public access, you are waiving authentication for a specific app. However, application authorization controls for public users operate the same as they do for users who are logged into your Quickbase account. Our role-based access controls allow you to control what data people can view when using a public app, as well as what they can edit, and whether they can add or delete records.
You also need to make sure that your use of Quickbase’s public access capability complies with your organization’s data governance obligations.
Data segregation
Due to Quickbase’s granular role-based access controls, you can securely store public and non-public data together in the same app. However, many choose to segregate the data instead.
You can do this by using two Quickbase apps which are integrated with each other – the first is open to the public, and the second is not. One of the apps stores only data viewable by or submitted by the public. Then the integration copies that public data to the second app, which also includes non-public data like approvals and notes.
Acceptable use
Usage of this public access capability must comply with the Acceptable Use Policies for the Quickbase platform as a whole, and for the special Everyone on the Internet user group.