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FileMaker 9 Released
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I work at a small college and have used Filemaker to build a Registration System, Admissions System, and Development System. The advantages are, in my opinion, that someone like me (a Director of Admissions with a full-time other job) can learn how to develop and deploy complex relational systems for small to medium-sized use. It's actually amazing. In my industry, there's either home-grown or behemoth, multi-million dollar systems. I've figured using Filemaker has saved our institution between 3 - 5 million dollars. While there are shortcomings, I'll take them.
However, Filemaker 9 may not be worth the upgrade, unless plugging into SQL databases is needed. Very interesting and long overdue, but otherwise, a minor upgrade in my opinion. I'll be buying my copy now...
However, Filemaker 9 may not be worth the upgrade, unless plugging into SQL databases is needed. Very interesting and long overdue, but otherwise, a minor upgrade in my opinion. I'll be buying my copy now...
Employee Time Clock Solution
I used FileMaker to build my own employee time clock solution. It worked out so well, I made it configurable and now sell it on my Web site. URL removed
I used FileMaker to build my own employee time clock solution. It worked out so well, I made it configurable and now sell it on my Web site. URL removed
It's probably also difficult to pay your developers if your customers expect free software for years at a time.
And large companies have multi-seat licensing with subscription services too.
If you didn't buy every upgrade, it would essentially be the same as FM waiting several years between versions. FM usually offers "amnesty" for previous version upgrade pricing for a couple of months following each release. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade every year.
Good work with that. That's actually pretty impressive. I had no idea that Filemaker was capable of that level of UI design. I'll have to check it out in my spare time. I can think of many uses for that both at home and at work.
How much actual coding went into creating that or is it all just form-based?
I used Filemaker 5 (old, old school!) to build an inventory and invoice system for my company's online store. Seven years later, the system is still going strong.
If anyone here is a manga (Japanese comics) fan and wants to see the pretty sales invoices Filemaker can generate, you can place an order here
URL removed
If anyone here is a manga (Japanese comics) fan and wants to see the pretty sales invoices Filemaker can generate, you can place an order here
URL removed
Filemaker Real World
I figured that I'd post a real world example of FileMaker can do if you put your mind to it. I worked for a company that ran their ENITRE business on Filemaker. They sold Nutritional Supplements in the millions. Over 1,000 orders a day processed using Filemaker, credit card processing in real-time, shipping, inventory. A web based store was built in Lasso & MySQL and then synched to the Filemaker solution. The Filemaker databases were huge. Some totaling over 10GB in size. They had about 150 clients connected to 4 Filemaker servers. The clients ran both Windows and Mac, and worked cross platform perfectly. I am not exaggerating these numbers at all. The company was featured on Filemaker's WebSite for many years as a success story. We had 4 XServes running Filemaker 6 and later Filemaker 8.
It was fast and worked really well. Competitors came in and tried to reproduce the system and failed, several times over. Even Oracle had come in and tried to do a presentation and the cost was $5 million +++.
FileMaker is a very capable system and can handle nearly and small to medium sized business with development costs that are a fraction of what larger comparable systems are.
With the edition of MySQL, I am very excited to see this and can make use f it almost immediately. Think of building a small/quick solution for controlling parts of a website. It will be easy to build.
I'm excited for this release and have been waiting for it ever since FM Dev Con last year.
I figured that I'd post a real world example of FileMaker can do if you put your mind to it. I worked for a company that ran their ENITRE business on Filemaker. They sold Nutritional Supplements in the millions. Over 1,000 orders a day processed using Filemaker, credit card processing in real-time, shipping, inventory. A web based store was built in Lasso & MySQL and then synched to the Filemaker solution. The Filemaker databases were huge. Some totaling over 10GB in size. They had about 150 clients connected to 4 Filemaker servers. The clients ran both Windows and Mac, and worked cross platform perfectly. I am not exaggerating these numbers at all. The company was featured on Filemaker's WebSite for many years as a success story. We had 4 XServes running Filemaker 6 and later Filemaker 8.
It was fast and worked really well. Competitors came in and tried to reproduce the system and failed, several times over. Even Oracle had come in and tried to do a presentation and the cost was $5 million +++.
FileMaker is a very capable system and can handle nearly and small to medium sized business with development costs that are a fraction of what larger comparable systems are.
With the edition of MySQL, I am very excited to see this and can make use f it almost immediately. Think of building a small/quick solution for controlling parts of a website. It will be easy to build.
I'm excited for this release and have been waiting for it ever since FM Dev Con last year.
I know you're joking, but actually I was thinking this might not be the worst idea in the world.
I (along with many others here, by the looks of things) like and use FileMaker software. If FileMaker were to bring out a mobile version that worked flawlessly on the iPhone - by which I mean have the cross-functionality between an FM database and phone / Internet / Google Maps - it would make the fairly-hefty price tag all the more bearable!
Really don't want to turn this thread into another iPhone discussion; just a thought...
FileMaker's "External Data Source" feature lets you make one-way or two-way connections to MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and maybe others in the future.
Does this let me build an application that relies only on relational databases elsewhere, and not use FileMaker to store the data at all?
Does this let me build an application that relies only on relational databases elsewhere, and not use FileMaker to store the data at all?
Wacky Packages Collection
Take a look at the menu structure and also I built in a protection scheme for 15 day trial. It's pretty powerful software. The only thing I wish it had was a print preview button. I had to create a navigator to preview reports.
I use it also for a card collecting database for Wacky Packages (anyone remember those?). You can see it at URL removed - Now this gets to be fun software!
Take a look at the menu structure and also I built in a protection scheme for 15 day trial. It's pretty powerful software. The only thing I wish it had was a print preview button. I had to create a navigator to preview reports.
A general reminder:
Please don't post links to products at commercial sites you are associated with, since we disallow advertising in the forums. We know that people are interested in discussing their uses of FileMaker, and you are are welcome to discuss how you used FileMaker (or why you didn't use it) for a commercial site, without the links.
People are also welcome to PM each other to ask for links.
Thank you.
Please don't post links to products at commercial sites you are associated with, since we disallow advertising in the forums. We know that people are interested in discussing their uses of FileMaker, and you are are welcome to discuss how you used FileMaker (or why you didn't use it) for a commercial site, without the links.
People are also welcome to PM each other to ask for links.
Thank you.
Maybe we should start another thread about commercial sites using Filemaker software. I am always interested in how other people create databases and how they create their layouts. I do sell the program but it's a very niche market and I sell one about every month or so, basically a hobby.
I'm interested too, as a matter of fact, but another thread would be subject to the same rules. If people post links to business sites, the moderators can't read minds to know if somebody is promoting a product vs. talking about the technology behind the website. So I suggest that we do what marco114 did above - talk about using FileMaker without publicly linking people to commercial sites.
Links to FileMaker-run sites of very well-known companies would be OK, as would links to educational or non-profit sites that use FileMaker. If there are any such sites!
Enough is Enough
I love FileMaker as much as the next guy, but let's put our energies in the right place. We don't need new features as much as we need the old ones fixed up. If ClarisWorks could have a true, wrapping, formatted, page-breaking word processor that merged data flawlessly, why can't FileMaker? And, no, a tall layout with a big text box isn't good enough.
And an option to exit the current script before running a script from the menu like you can for buttons.
And printing that doesn't muck up in Windows.
These things are much more important. Maybe not as easy to hype as you market, but definitely important.
As for real-world application - my organization (a continuing education provider) is marketing a database suite for other continuing education providers with a full user interface, soft-coding of most features (allowing clients to tweak it to meet their needs), and online participant registration. [Referring now to FileMaker] Very powerful, yet pretty lame at the basic things that should already be a part of the original Claris code.
Like gradients!
I love FileMaker as much as the next guy, but let's put our energies in the right place. We don't need new features as much as we need the old ones fixed up. If ClarisWorks could have a true, wrapping, formatted, page-breaking word processor that merged data flawlessly, why can't FileMaker? And, no, a tall layout with a big text box isn't good enough.
And an option to exit the current script before running a script from the menu like you can for buttons.
And printing that doesn't muck up in Windows.
These things are much more important. Maybe not as easy to hype as you market, but definitely important.
As for real-world application - my organization (a continuing education provider) is marketing a database suite for other continuing education providers with a full user interface, soft-coding of most features (allowing clients to tweak it to meet their needs), and online participant registration. [Referring now to FileMaker] Very powerful, yet pretty lame at the basic things that should already be a part of the original Claris code.
Like gradients!
I've used it, and seen it used, quite a bit in the education industry. Filemaker is very powerful when it comes to the presentation of data, ie reports. A person can gank an export from whatever system they're on, import it, and tweak it without end, sort it as needed, filter, summarize, generate labels, generate invoices/reports, etc. I personally think its a bit easier to use than MS Office in this regard.
Also, it's very useful as a data entry tool. Give someone a layout with fields you want entered, put the proper validation on the fields, and let noobs have at it. Much, much better than having people send you spreadsheets that have inconsistent data. In all of this, you can have multiple people doing data entry into one database with as many layouts as you need.
As others have said here, you can go much farther and build whole applications around it, although I don't trust it that much, and find it to be a rather limiting platform for large processes. (I feel the same way about Access.) Anyway, though, it's a great tool for one-off databases and data manipulation... which really is fairly common in business and education.
I'd tend to say yes. Up until now FM only provided it's own stinking, short sighted and rather limited web integration with some sort of proprietary ML. Now that they've finally realized that there is (and has been for years now, ever since OS X was introduced) already an industry standard web server on Mac OS (Apache) with very versatile server side scripting capabilities (PHP, actually not just limited to web scripting) it's perfectly possible to build some serious web apps with FM as a database.
FM vs. Access
FileMaker all the way! Here's why:
- FM is available on both the Mac and Win platform. Access is Windows only
- Access is a Microsoft product. As such it does not excel (no pun intended..) in areas like ease of use and standards.
- Many access "developers" still heavily use VBA because they don't know better. I rejoiced when I learned it is on the way out. Even though FM uses it's own proprietary scripting language it's still far better than VBA. (Oh, and did I mention that I despise VBA?)
I'm sure there are more good reasons.
I'm sure there's many people who would disagree with me (not on this board, though). Don't listen to them. They don't know better. I have hacked together DB/frontend solutions in both FM and Access and I sure know what to choose if the choice is mine.
Not being an expert in either, could someone tell me why they would choose Filemaker over Access, or vice-versa?
I work at a Help Desk, in a predominantly Windows environment, and someone is bound to ask me this...
FileMaker all the way! Here's why:
- FM is available on both the Mac and Win platform. Access is Windows only
- Access is a Microsoft product. As such it does not excel (no pun intended..) in areas like ease of use and standards.
- Many access "developers" still heavily use VBA because they don't know better. I rejoiced when I learned it is on the way out. Even though FM uses it's own proprietary scripting language it's still far better than VBA. (Oh, and did I mention that I despise VBA?)
I'm sure there are more good reasons.
I'm sure there's many people who would disagree with me (not on this board, though). Don't listen to them. They don't know better. I have hacked together DB/frontend solutions in both FM and Access and I sure know what to choose if the choice is mine.
I don't think they are. 7-8 was smaller. 4-5 was small, 5-6 was small. The two huge upgrades were 2-3 (relational capabilities), and 6-7 (multi-table, new engine).
It could be they're focusing on features you don't care about. I for one, have no need for SQL integration. I'm more interested in UI developments such as dynamic tab views and modern UI elements.
PHP & e-commerce
Our company has already built just that!
SHAMELESS PLUG: URL removed (see Doctor Q's posts above)
Our company has already built just that!
SHAMELESS PLUG: URL removed (see Doctor Q's posts above)
Ah the good old days...
I was a Filemaker developer for 10 years from v. 2.1 onwards. It was a great experience.
I have now been a Servoy developer for about 6 and would NEVER consider building a new solution in Filemaker. All of the things that Filemaker got wrong over the years were solved at a stroke with the first version of Servoy - which has gone through 3 iterations since that.
For anyone considering what Filemaker might do for development, Servoy is truly king and has none of the compromises that Filemaker has had to make.
I'm not bashing Filemaker per se, I am just someone who was pressed against a glass ceiling with the limitations of Filemaker, and have found myself at the bottom with a big open sky ahead with Servoy. Servoy is quite Filemaker like in its approach, but has javascript methods, can use ANY (*this is important*) SQL back end - think being able to relate the default Sybase IAnywhere database (which has all sorts of enterprise class features just by its-self) to a MySQL database which drives your web content, while also relating to an existing Oracle system which handles your accounting, with all three databases in different locations, and being able to make it available (*this is also important*) OVER THE INTERNET to 50,000 clients (clients, records and database file size are limited by the hardware, not the software. Servoy has a concurrency based licensing system. You apply 10 licenses to the server software and 10 clients can connect, whichever machines, locally or over the internet... No CDs in boxes, or serial numbers to manage, or licenses being tied to specific computers etc.
Servoy does have a bit of a learning curve - but is very familiar to Filemaker developers, it is cheaper than Filemaker (no Servoy server costs and a cheaper client), has a Java smart client mode, a headless client mode (clients are spawned on the server), has an Ajax webclient mode, (see the Servoy forums to note how quickly they implement changes, and how quickly the Servoy community helps to solve problems.)
Filemaker was a great product but has been scuppered by architectural programming issues which were never solved. They're trying to dig themselves out of a hole but must rely exclusively on existing business re-buying their software so every couple of revisions they change the file format to force an upgrade on everyone... Awful practice...
No, I don't work for Servoy, I'm just a developer and cannot find faults with their product, where I could find almost nothing but faults (or at least serious limitations) with Filemaker. Probably 50% of my development work now is converting Filemaker solutions (some of which I built myself, years ago) into Servoy ones.. I'd never look back.
I was a Filemaker developer for 10 years from v. 2.1 onwards. It was a great experience.
I have now been a Servoy developer for about 6 and would NEVER consider building a new solution in Filemaker. All of the things that Filemaker got wrong over the years were solved at a stroke with the first version of Servoy - which has gone through 3 iterations since that.
For anyone considering what Filemaker might do for development, Servoy is truly king and has none of the compromises that Filemaker has had to make.
I'm not bashing Filemaker per se, I am just someone who was pressed against a glass ceiling with the limitations of Filemaker, and have found myself at the bottom with a big open sky ahead with Servoy. Servoy is quite Filemaker like in its approach, but has javascript methods, can use ANY (*this is important*) SQL back end - think being able to relate the default Sybase IAnywhere database (which has all sorts of enterprise class features just by its-self) to a MySQL database which drives your web content, while also relating to an existing Oracle system which handles your accounting, with all three databases in different locations, and being able to make it available (*this is also important*) OVER THE INTERNET to 50,000 clients (clients, records and database file size are limited by the hardware, not the software. Servoy has a concurrency based licensing system. You apply 10 licenses to the server software and 10 clients can connect, whichever machines, locally or over the internet... No CDs in boxes, or serial numbers to manage, or licenses being tied to specific computers etc.
Servoy does have a bit of a learning curve - but is very familiar to Filemaker developers, it is cheaper than Filemaker (no Servoy server costs and a cheaper client), has a Java smart client mode, a headless client mode (clients are spawned on the server), has an Ajax webclient mode, (see the Servoy forums to note how quickly they implement changes, and how quickly the Servoy community helps to solve problems.)
Filemaker was a great product but has been scuppered by architectural programming issues which were never solved. They're trying to dig themselves out of a hole but must rely exclusively on existing business re-buying their software so every couple of revisions they change the file format to force an upgrade on everyone... Awful practice...
No, I don't work for Servoy, I'm just a developer and cannot find faults with their product, where I could find almost nothing but faults (or at least serious limitations) with Filemaker. Probably 50% of my development work now is converting Filemaker solutions (some of which I built myself, years ago) into Servoy ones.. I'd never look back.