We maintain an Airtable base for each of our clients, as a central knowledgebase for the work we complete with them.
The challenge we have is that we are always finding ways to improve the base/interface design, and there's no easy way of pushing these updates to every existing customer, resulting in inconsistent implementations.
The more obvious answer is for all customers to be on the same base. Still, we use multiple interfaces on top for each customer, which then isn't very scaleable or user-friendly for admins having to navigate to the right interface. The other issue here is that we consider this an asset we can hand back to the client when parting ways, so having to unpick just their data when this happens is another potential hurdle.
We could build our own custom software to replace interfaces, but we love the Interface design and feature set and don't want to have to invest unnecessarily.
Our current update process involves waiting to make a bunch of updates on one customer's base, and then when there's a sufficient difference, we create a duplicate of that base to become the template and then create copies for every customer and manually copy their table data into the new version.
We also track Airtable record IDs in our ClickUp task management platform meaning we have to go through and update the ids manually as these change when we copy table data over to the new base.
As you can imagine this is an extremely time-consuming and error-prone process. We use 'Make' heavily for automation so I'm wondering if there's an approach we could take to automate this swap-over process for every customer when updating the base/interface configuration.
Has anyone tackled a similar problem before or have any ideas on how to approach this?
Thanks!
