Intuit, like many software vendors, has its sites on collaboration. Recently, I had an interesting conversation with Bill Lucchini and Peter Fearey of Intuit’s QuickBase business unit. Bill, the vice president and general manager of QuickBase, is a thirteen-year Intuit veteran. Peter, who handles product management, used to work at Apple.

QuickBase is quietly making inroads into enterprises with a suite of online productivity applications. Reportedly, 45 of Fortune 100 companies use QuickBase. In true Web 2.0 fashion, all users need is a browser. So these applications typically run under the radar of the IT department. It’s easy to input an Excel spreadsheet into QuickBase. Multiple users can then update the spreadsheet, and they can set email alerts so that each collaborator knows when a colleague has made changes. Users can also customize their own QuickBase applications for managing everything from the office coffee fund to inventory. 

Not surprisingly, Procter & Gamble is using QuickBase. P&G, which I wrote about in The Culture of Collaboration book, is a collaborative company that is open to exploring how new tools can create value.

While the QuickBase approach to collaboration has been asynchronous to date, the team is considering adding such real-time capabilities as instant messaging and web conferencing. So if a user is working in a QuickBase application, he or she could spontaneously invite a colleague to join. Such a move could make Intuit a more formidable force in collaboration.