Welcome fellow NoCoder!

Sept 17th Discover NoCode issue #11

• Tool - SmartSuite

• Leader Spotlight - Jon & Tara Darbyshire + Emma Montgomery

• Community & Resources - SmartSuite’s BetterMode and Discord Communities

• Story - How SmartSuite is beating the odds building the next generation of productivity software.

• Training Video - Learn more about the most recent features being released in SmartSuite and the next big release on Sept 18th! (Tomorrow!)

Tool

SmartSuite

SmartSuite is a project and workflow management platform designed to help teams organize, track, and automate their tasks across a variety of industries. It offers customizable templates, real-time collaboration, and automated workflows to streamline both simple and complex processes. With a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, SmartSuite’s UX makes it easy for teams to adopt and a joy to use. It is becoming popular in areas like GRC, product development, construction, HR, and marketing.

Strengths:

• Easy to Understand Relational Database: SmartSuite makes it trivial to build tables of data and connect them to one another in one-to-many or many-to-many relationships.

• Comprehensive Workflow Automation: SmartSuite excels in automating both simple and complex workflows, which helps users save time by reducing manual tasks.

• User-Friendly Interface: Each part of SmartSuite and it’s UI has been thought out for how a user would want interact with the data naturally. It is refreshing to use a software that works intuitively in the way that I expected it to.

• Real-Time Collaboration: Each record in SmartSuite has a communication panel that lets you chat with your team and @ mention specific members. Work on the same records together and watch reports update without page refreshes.

• Strong Integrations: Integrate with nearly any tool under the sun via platforms like Softr, Zapier, Make, Noloco and more.

Weaknesses:

• Limited Customization for Forms: While the platform provides great forms there are limited options for customizing the layout, flow, field visibility, and design of a form which may not meet all user needs.

• No Role-Based Permissions: SmartSuite has a static permission system that leverages user assignment fields in tandem with a set of predefined users types and their purposes in the system. This can become a limitation when you need to make a highly customized visual experience for a specific group of users.

• Business Logic Processes After Save: Formulas on Forms in SmartSuite don’t act like calculators changing in real time as you enter values, to see the formulas update you have to commit the data to the database and view the results.

Leader Spotlight

Tara Darbyshire ↗, Jon Darbyshire ↗ and Emma Montgomery ↗

Tara and Jon are co-founders of SmartSuite and Emma is one of the start consultants that helps build and demo solutions to interested clients. Jon and Tara are both exceptionally sharp with Jon working as the CEO and Tara leading their partnerships. Emma is a lead consultant helping clients see demos and solutions materialize before fully committing to the platform.

Having followed each of them for quite some time they are each exceptional at what they do and I can’t wait to continue learning more from them!

Learn more about them individually in the links above or check out their company’s LinkedIn page below!

Community & Resources

SmartSuite’s BetterMode and Discord Communities

These communities are the best place to find out more about SmartSuite, get answers about their tool and see what other people in the community are building with their tool as well! Bettermode is an exceptional forum and interactive space. Discord is a real-time communication.

Bettermode is great for forum-type discussions and Discord is amazing for it’s real-time communication with peers in the community and in some cases even the SmartSuite team! We love that they decided to use these platforms to stay in touch with their communities.

Story

SmartSuite is beating the odds building the next generation of productivity software.

SmartSuite might be a little bit later to the NoCode space but when you use their software it’s clear they’ve thought about not just the backend but also the user experience as well. The efforts they have made to marry a robust backend with a wonderful front-end experience is obvious. They aren’t just trying to build a database, they are trying to give the end users interacting with it a great experience.

While other productivity tools completely abstract away the relational database side of things, SmartSuite brings together the relational database in a great, simplified way. Allowing for many-to-many or one-to-many relationships to be easily made.

Formula fields use dot notation allowing you to access data across tables through the relationships you make.

All-in-all they have done an exceptional job at building a user experience that gives you all the same ease-of-use that you get in tools like Monday with the robust relational DB experience of Airtables.

They post their roadmap publicly using canny.io. Feel free to check it out and see what they’ve got cooking!

Training Video

Learn more about the most recent features being released in SmartSuite and the next big release on Sept 18th! (Tomorrow!)

SmartSuite hosts monthly feature release webinars that you can join and see what they are working on! These are live with their team demoing the new features and taking questions at the end of the webinar so be sure to join this one tomorrow morning at 8AM PT! It’s going to be their biggest release yet!

If you’re looking to learn how to use SmartSuite feel free to check out their training resources as well at the SmartSuite Academy!

Have a stellar week and keep on Discovering NoCode!

Have a tool or other idea you think we should highlight?
Email us at: [email protected]