With improved customization capabilities and more prebuilt applications, the latest version of Intuit's QuickBase hosted database application gives companies a convenient option for building Web-based applications quickly.

Intuit updated QuickBase for Corporate Workgroups in November, with prices starting at $249 per month for 10 users. Volume pricing can make QuickBase quite affordable, at $3 per user per month.

For quickly building relatively simple database applications, I like QuickBase because its administration tools and ready-to-use applications simplify the basics while providing a way to tweak an application to my liking.

This release includes a spreadsheet view for building an application so that novices used to working in Excel can build out the basics in a simple spreadsheet and later customize the database through the normal tools. Unfortunately, I couldn't return to the spreadsheet view once the database had been saved.

I also liked the reminders engine, which let me set up some fairly robust e-mail-based task reminders based on date fields in an application. The notification engine supports inherent field rights, so some users can receive data in fields that only they are privy to.

Previous versions of the product didn't let me specify required fields in the form editor. This has been changed with the new release. The form editor has other improvements that made it easier to create custom forms for applications, including grouping fields.

More information is available at www.quickbase.com.

This article was first published on eweek.com.